At length I saw the spire of Olney, and soon I crossed the bridge, over whose “wearisome, but needful length,” used to come the news from London, to solace Cowper’s winter evenings. I was not long in finding the poet’s most unpoetical home, now occupied by a petty shop-keeper, who has turned his parlour into a stall. Here he lived, however, and here he sang: here, motherly Mrs. Unwin made tea for him, and Lady Austen gave him “the sofa” for his “Task.” Under these stairs once lodged Puss, Tiney, and Bess; those happy hares which, alone of their kind, have had a _local habitation_, and will always have _a name_. In the garden, I saw where the cucumber-vine used to grow, and where Puss used to ruminate beneath its leaves, like Jonah under his gourd. An apple-tree was pointed out to me as “set by Mr. Cowper’s own hands.” The garden has been pieced off, and to see the “summer-house,” I was forced to enter, by a neighbour’s leave, another enclosure. Here is the little nestling-place of Cowper’s poesy—the retreat where his Egeria came to him. In the fence, is still the wicket he made, to let him into the parsonage-grounds, when Newton was his confessor. ‘Here, then,’ I said, ‘one may fancy the lily and the rose, growing in rivalry; and another rose _just washed in a shower_; and the _sound of the church-going bell_, and a thousand other minute matters in themselves, all taking their place in the poetic magazine of Cowper, and so coming into verse, through his brain, as the mulberry leaf becomes silk, by another process of spinning.’ It was a small field for such a harvest, and yet “the Task” grew here.