don, and he
had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_, published in 1779 by his friend
and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in
earnest when he was nearly fifty years old. In 1782, the date of his
first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one
English poet during the past twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all
English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books
and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings.
Cowper had a most unhappy life. As a child he was shy, sensitive, and
sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither
he was sent after his mother's death. This happened when he was six
years old; and in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My
Mother's Picture_, he speaks of himself as a

Wretch even then, life's journey just begun.

In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a
year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a
broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted
for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious
melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made
attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness
did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his
wounded spirit. His two poems _To Mary Unwin_, together with the lines
on his mother's picture, were almost the first examples of deep and
tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper found
relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round
of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, took long
walks through the neighborhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs.
Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin, and amused himself with carpentry,
gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals
he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time
a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, _The
Task_, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic
life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table,
the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He
draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a
barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper