They are the work of a religious man of culture,
and free from anything wild, erotic, or unctuous. But on the other
hand there is nothing in them suited to be the vehicle of lofty
devotion, nothing, that we can conceive a multitude or even a
prayer-meeting uplifting to heaven with voice and heart. Southey has
pointed to some passages on which the shadow of the advancing malady
falls; but in the main there is a predominance of religious joy and
hope. The most despondent hymn of the series is _Temptation_, the
thought of which resembles that of _The Castaway_.
Cowper's melancholy may have been aggravated by the loss of his only
brother, who died about this time, and at whose death-bed he was
present; though in the narrative which he wrote, joy at John's
conversion and the religious happiness of his end seems to exclude the
feelings by which hypochondria was likely to be fed. But his mode of
life under Newton was enough to account for the return of his disease,
which in this sense may be fairly laid to the charge of religion.
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