Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never turned the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to him now. His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is neither quite of the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is busy--endlessly, wearisomely busy--with his translation of Homer. I have often wondered what the result would have been had his good friends and neighbours the Throckmortons converted him from his rigid Calvinism to their own milder Catholic faith, and set him in spiritual comfort to writing another _Task_. Idle conjecture! For the rest of his life he toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did not want and which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes the pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over her sick companion: The twentieth year is well-nigh past, Since first our sky was overcast; Ah would that this might be the last! My Mary! Thy spirits have a fainter flow, I see thee daily weaker grow-- 'T was my distress that brought thee low, My Mary! The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin, the Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away into Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling moments of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of the wild images with the stately and restrained language leaves an impression of awe, almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "are like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner away"; and again to the same faithful friend from Mundesley on the coast: The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down from; and yesterday evening, by moonlight, I passed sometimes within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been dashed in pieces would perhaps have been best for me, I shrunk from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left at the high-water mark. I have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me.