The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if one of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the rocks and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far off. "For my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a Thames wherry, in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well the value of the creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me, that I have a sensible sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in being once more blown to Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy country walks; friends that are more than friends to occupy his heart, and quaint characters to engage his wit. He finds an image of his days in Rousseau's description of an English morning, and his evenings differ from them in nothing except that they are still more snug and quieter. His talk is of the mercies and deliverance of God; he is eager to convert the little world of his correspondents to his own exultant peace; and, it must be confessed, only the charm and breeding of his language save a number of these letters from the wearisomeness of misplaced preaching. Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later came the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and which gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter. He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a brother, suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary matters, but the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him. Thenceforth he never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the conviction that he had been abandoned by God--rather that for some inscrutable reason God had deliberately singled him out as a victim of omnipotent wrath and eternal damnation. No doubt there was some physical origin, some lesion of the nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but the peculiar form of his mania and its virulence can be traced to causes quite within the range of literary explanation. He was a scapegoat of his age; he accepted with perfect faith what other men talked about, and it darkened his reason. Those were the days when a sharp and unwholesome opposition had arisen between the compromise of the Church with worldly forms and the evangelical absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John Newton. Cowper himself, on emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans, had adopted the extreme Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine omnipotence. Man was but a toy in the hands of an arbitrary Providence; conversion was first a recognition of the utter nullity of the human will; and there was no true religion, no salvation, until Grace had descended freely like a fire from heaven and devoured this offering of a man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one should read his letter of March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed conversion of his