Just before this outbreak, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin had agreed to marry, but after it they felt the subject was not to be approached, and so the poor things spoke of it no more. Still, it was well they had spoken out. 'Love me, and tell me so,' is a wise maxim of behaviour. Stupid people, themselves leading, one is glad to believe, far duller lives than Cowper and Mary Unwin, have been known to make dull, ponderous jokes about this _ménage_ at Olney--its country walks, its hymn tunes, its religious exercises. But it is pleasant to note how quick Sainte Beuve, whose three papers on Cowper are amongst the glories of the _Causeries du Lundi_, is to recognise how much happiness and pleasantness was to be got out of this semi-monastic life and close social relation. Cowper was indeed the very man for it. One can apply to him his own well-known lines about the winter season, and crown him 'The King of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, and homeborn happiness.' No doubt he went mad at times. It was a terrible affliction. But how many men have complaints of the liver, and are as cheerful to live with as the Black Death, or Young's _Night Thoughts_. Cowper had a famous constitution. Not even Dr. James's powder, or the murderous practices of the faculty, could undermine it. Sadness is not dulness. 'Dear saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear, Nor suffering that shuts up eye and ear To all which has delighted them before, And lets us be what we were once no more! No! we may suffer deeply, yet retain Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain, By what of old pleased us, and will again. No! 'tis the gradual furnace of the world, In whose hot air our spirits are upcurled Until they crumble, or else grow like steel, Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring, Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel, But takes away the power--this can avail By drying up our joy in everything, To make our former pleasures all seem stale.' I can think of no one to whom these beautiful lines of Mr. Arnold's are so exquisitely appropriate as to Cowper. Nothing could knock the humanity out of him. Solitude, sorrow, madness, found him out, threw him down and tore him, as did the devils their victims in the days of old; but when they left him for a season, he rose from his misery as sweet and as human, as interested and as interesting as ever. His descriptions of natural scenery and country-side doings are amongst his best things. He moralises enough, heaven knows! but he keeps his morality out of his descriptions. This is rather a relief after overdoses of Wordsworth's pantheism and Keats's paganism. Cowper's Nature is plain county Bucks. 'The sheepfold here Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe. At first progressive as a stream, they seek The middle field; but scattered by degrees, Each to his choice, soon whiten all the land.'