went through them, and he listened to them in silence till he came to John Gilpin, which he begged not to hear. It reminded him of cheerful days, and of those of whom he could not bear to think. "The grinners at John Gilpin," he said, "little dream what the author sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!" On his death-bed, when the clergyman told him to confide in the love of the Redeemer, who desired to save all men, Cowper gave a passionate cry, begging him not to give him such consolations. To our ignorant eyes it looks strange that the author of our best and most popular hymns should have thought his sins unpardonable; should have believed himself already damned. One of Cowper's visitors and pensioners at Olney was a poor school-master (Teedon) who thought himself specially favored by Providence, and to whom Cowper communicated his waking dreams, and consulted, as a person whom the Lord was pleased to answer in prayer. This recalls a similar fact of the illustrious Tycho Brahe. When he lived in Uraniberg he maintained an idiot of the name of Lep, who lay at his feet whenever he sat down to dinner, and whom he fed with his own hand. Persuaded that his mind, when moved, was capable of fore-telling future events, Tycho carefully marked everything he said. (Striking instances, it may be observed, of the tribute which intelligence and science unconsciously pay to faith.) It is pathetic to think, says Alger, how many great men have, like Homer and Milton, had the windows of their souls closed. Galileo, in his seventy-third year, wrote to one of his correspondents, "Alas! your dear friend has become irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times past the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space which I myself occupy. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore, please me also." Haendel passed the last seven years of his life in total blindness, in the gloom of the porch of death. How he and the spectators must have felt when the great composer, in 1753, stood pale and tremulous, with his sightless eyeballs turned toward a tearful concourse of people, while his sad song from Samson, "Total eclipse, no sun, no moon," was delivered! Leigh Hunt said of Haendel: He was the grandest composer that is known to have existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs of heaven and earth together. Mozart said of him, that he struck you, whenever he pleased, with a thunderbolt. His hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word "wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together.