Cowper | Page 7

When its crisis arrived, he
was living by himself without any society of the kind that suited him
(for the excitement of the Nonsense Club was sure to be followed by
reaction); he had lost hiss love, his father, his home, and as it happened
also a dear friend; his little patrimony was fast dwindling away; he
must have despaired of success in his profession; and his outlook was
altogether dark. It yielded to the remedies to which hypochondria
usually yields, air, exercise, sunshine, cheerful society, congenial
occupation. It came with January and went with May. Its gathering
gloom was dispelled for a time by a stroll in fine weather on the hills
above Southampton Water, and Cowper said that he was never unhappy
for a whole day in the company of Lady Hesketh. When he had become
a Methodist, his hypochondria took a religious form, but so did his
recovery from hypochondria; both must be set down to the account of
his faith, or neither. This double aspect of the matter will plainly appear
further on. A votary of wealth when his brain gives way under disease
or age fancies that he is a beggar. A Methodist when his brain gives
way under the same influences fancies that he is forsaken of God. In
both cases the root of the malady is physical,
In the lines which Cowper sent on his disappointment to Theodora's
sister, and which record the sources of his despondency, there is not a
touch of religious despair, or of anything connected with religion. The

catastrophe was brought on by an incident with which religion had
nothing to do. The office of clerk of the Journals in the House of Lords
fell vacant, and was in the gift of Cowper's kinsman Major Cowper, as
patentee. Cowper received the nomination. He had longed for the office,
sinfully as he afterwards fancied; it would exactly have suited him and
made him comfortable for life. But his mind had by this time
succumbed to his malady. His fancy conjured up visions of opposition
to the appointment in the House of Lords; of hostility in the office
where he had to study the Journals; of the terrors of an examination to
be undergone before the frowning peers. After hopelessly poring over
the Journals for some months he became quite mad, and his madness
took a suicidal form. He has told with unsparing exactness the story of
his attempts to kill himself. In his youth his father had unwisely given
him a treatise in favour of suicide to read, and when he argued against
it, had listened to his reasonings in a silence which he construed as
sympathy with the writer, though it seems to have been only
unwillingness to think too badly of the state of a departed friend. This
now recurred to his mind, and talk with casual companions in taverns
and chophouses was enough in his present condition to confirm him in
his belief that self-destruction was lawful. Evidently he was perfectly
insane, for he could not take up a newspaper without reading in it a
fancied libel on himself. First he bought laudanum, and had gone out
into the fields with the intention of swallowing it, when the love of life
suggested another way of escaping the dreadful ordeal. He might sell
all he had, fly to France, change his religion, and bury himself in a
monastery. He went home to pack up; but while he was looking over
his portmanteau, his mood changed, and he again resolved on
self-destruction. Taking a coach he ordered the coachman to drive to
the Tower Wharf, intending to throw himself into the river. But the
love of life once more interposed, under the guise of a low tide and a
porter seated on the quay. Again in the coach, and afterwards in his
chambers, he tried to swallow the laudanum; but his hand was
paralysed by "the convincing Spirit," aided by seasonable interruptions
from the presence of his laundress and her husband, and at length he
threw the laudanum away. On the night before the day appointed for
the examination before the Lords, he lay some time with the point of
his penknife pressed against his heart, but without courage to drive it

home. Lastly he tried to hang himself; and on this occasion he seems to
have been saved not by the love of life, or by want of resolution, but by
mere accident. He had become insensible, when the garter by which he
was suspended broke, and his fall brought in the laundress, who
supposed him to be in a fit. He sent her to a friend, to whom he related
all that had passed, and despatched him to his kinsman. His kinsman
arrived, listened with horror to the story,