Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more,
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way,
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd
In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd.
'Tis now become a history little known,
That once we call'd the pastoral house our own.
Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the
cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of
the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself
only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose
birth had cost their mother's life.
When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the sad
and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad and attempted suicide.
What was the source of his madness? There is a vague tradition that it
arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of
insanity. Hut in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the
kind; his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness
point to nothing worse than general ungodliness and occasional excess
in wine; and the tradition derives a colour of probability only from
the loose lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he
had lived.
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