To the malady
which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English
poets.
At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness
than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In
short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and
God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions
with any saint, in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if
Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good
poetry. But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he
should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the
influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.
The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at
the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the
spirit of poetry seemed to have fled.
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