In one of his letters he says that his own experience contradicts the philosophical axiom that nothing can communicate what it has not in itself, for that he wrote certain poems “to amuse a mind oppressed with melancholy,” and that by so doing he has “comforted others, at the same time that they administer to me no consolation.” One can hardly believe that from a mind over which hung such clouds and darkness there could issue such a piece as “John Gilpin,” or the “Report of an adjudged case, not to be found in any of the books.” Yet the mind of man is wondrous! What powerful efforts will it not make to rise into a region, where it can behold the cheerful light of day, and breathe the healthful air of freedom. Cowper long looked upon himself as a doomed reprobate, a hopeless exile from the favor of God—but faith triumphed at last. That exploded absurdity—that a powerful genius must necessarily reside in a slender and morbid frame—seems long to have possessed even intelligent minds. Education is coming to be considered as properly embracing our whole physical, intellectual, and moral being, and the time, we hope, is at hand, when it will be no reproach to carry about a robust mind in a robust body. Indeed we have among the intellectual magnates of the land, men of massive fames and ample physical development. Look at the stalwort line of Secretaries of State for some years past! But a poet must be a man of more ethereal mould. Why so? Behold Sir Walter Scott, that man of regal imagination, who breathed the spirit of poetry into the body of his romance, and transfused romance into his poetry, while with dramatic energy and verisimilitude he summons before us, on the stage he has erected, the stirring scenes and characters of other days, as with the wand of an enchanter. What an athletic form ministered to the commands of his kingly mind, for it was he who loved to say, “My mind to me a kingdom is.” And Johnson, the critic, moralist, essayist, lexicographer, poet—yes, POET, for in his great mind the elements of the sublime and beautiful lay in all their wondrous nativity; Johnson was a man of giant physical strength, of an apparent animalism too awkward to admit of refinement in this world. Burns, too, was a man of massive mould, yet how exquisitely poetical. The philosophy of the union of soul and body is as yet little understood. We want _healthy_ men to conduct the affairs of the world, as well as to serve in the Court of the Muses and the Graces. What injuries have States sustained; what interruptions of the peace of the world have been caused by a fit of the gout, of dyspepsy, of morbid melancholy, of base intemperance, or by some paroxysm of passion engendered by the humors of an unhealthy body. The very Union of the States may be endangered by these causes. Had Cowper been free from those distressing maladies, from the depredations of that “fierce banditti,” as he calls them,