There is scarcely any ground in England so well known in imagination as the haunts of Cowper at Olney and Weston; there is little that is so interesting to the lover of moral and religious poetry. There the beautiful but unhappy poet seemed to have created a new world out of unknown ground, in which himself and his friends, the Unwins, Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh, the Throckmortons, and the rest, played a part of the simplest and most natural character, and which fascinated the whole public mind. The life, the spirit, and the poetry of Cowper present, when taken together, a most singular combination. He was timid in his habit, yet bold in his writing; melancholy in the tone of his mind, but full of fun and playfulness in his correspondence; wretched to an extraordinary degree, he yet made the whole nation merry with his John Gilpin and other humorous writings; despairing even of God's mercy and of salvation, his religious poetry is of the most cheerful and even triumphantly glad kind;
Filled with this joyous assurance, wherever he turns his eye on the magnificent spectacle of creation, he finds themes of noblest gratulation. He looks into the heavens, and exclaims:
Such is the buoyant and cordial tone of Cowper's poetry; how unlike that iron deadness that dared not and could not soften into prayer, which so often and so long oppressed him. Nay, it is not for himself that he rejoices only, but he feels in his glowing heart the gladness and the coming glory of the whole universe.
Such was the lofty and all-embracing spirit of that man whom hard dogmatists could yet terrify and chill into utterest woe. Shrinking from the world, he yet dared to lash this world from which he shrunk, with the force of a giant, and the justice of more than an Aristides. Of the Church, he yet satirized severely its errors, and the follies of its ministers; in political opinion he was free and indignant against oppression. The negro warmed his blood into a sympathy that produced the most effective strains on his behalf—the worm beneath his feet shared in his tenderness. Thus he walked through life, shunning its tumults and its highways, one of its mightiest laborers. In his poetry there was found no fear, no complaining; often thoroughly insane, nothing can surpass the sound mind of his compositions; haunted by delusions even to the attempt at suicide, there is no delusion in his page. All there is bright, clear, and consistent. Like his Divine Master, he may truly be said to have been bruised for our sakes. As a man, nervous terrors could vanquish him, and unfit him for active life; but as a poet, he rose above all nerves, all terrors, into the noblest heroism, and fitted and will continue to fit others for life, so long as just and vigorous thought, the most beautiful piety, and the truest human sympathies command the homage of mankind. There is no writer who surpasses Cowper as a moral and religious poet. Full of power and feeling, he often equals in solemn dignity Milton himself. He is as impressive as Young without his epigrammatic smartness; he is as fervently Christian as Montgomery, and in intense love of nature there is not one of our august band of illustrious writers who surpasses him. He shows the secret of his deep and untiring attachment to nature in the love of Him who made it.
The writings of Cowper testify every where to that grand sermon which is eternally preached in the open air; to that Gospel of the field and the forest, which, like the Gospel of Christ, is the voice of that love which overflows the universe; which puts down all sectarian bitterness in him who listens to it; which, being perfect, "casts out all fear," against which the gloom of bigots and the terrors of fanatics can not stand. It was this which healed his wounded spirit beneath the boughs of Yardley Chase, and came fanning his temples with a soothing freshness in the dells of Weston. When we follow his footsteps there, we somewhat wonder that scenes so unambitious could so enrapture him; but the glory came from within, and out of the materials of an ordinary walk he could raise a brilliant superstructure for eternity.
William Cowper was born in the parsonage of Great Berkhampstead. The Birmingham railway whirls you now past the spot; or you may, if you please, alight, and survey that house, hallowed by the love of a mother such as he has described, and by the record of it in those inimitable verses of the son on receiving her picture.
Cowper was at school at Market-street, Hertfordshire, then at Westminster; after which he was articled for three years to Mr. Chapman, a solicitor. After quitting Mr. Chapman, he entered the Inner Temple as a regular law student, where his associates were Thurlow, afterward the well-known lord-chancellor, Bonnel Thornton, and Colman. Cowper's family was well connected, both on the father's and mother's side, and he had every prospect of advancement; but this the sensitiveness of his nature prevented. Being successively appointed to the offices of reading clerk, clerk of the private committees in the House of Lords, and clerk of the Journals, he was so overwhelmed by being unexpectedly called on to discharge his duty publicly before the House, that it unsettled his mind, his prospects of a wordly nature were forever over, and in a state of the most settled melancholy he was committed to the care of Dr. Cotton, of St. Alban's. In the summer of 1765 he quitted St. Alban's, and retired to private lodgings in the town of Huntingdon. There he was, as by a direct act of Providence, led to the acquaintance of the family of the Rev. Mr. Unwin, one of the clergymen of the place. Cowper had attended his church, and his interesting appearance having attracted the attention of his son William Cawthorne Unwin, he followed him in his solitary walk, and introduced himself to him. This simple fact decided, as by the very finger of Heaven, the whole destiny of the poet, and probably secured him as a poet to the world. With this family he entered into the most affectionate intimacy. They were people after his own heart, pious, intelligent, and most amiable. The father was, however, soon after killed by a fall from his horse, the son was himself become a minister, and the widow, the ever-to-be-loved Mary Unwin, retired with the suffering poet to Olney, at the invitation of the Rev. John Newton, the clergyman there, where she watched over him with the tender solicitude of a mother. To her, in all probability, we owe all that we possess in the poetry of Cowper.
With his life here we are made familiar by his poetry and letters, and the biography of Hayley. His long returns of melancholy; the writing of poetry, which Mrs. Unwin suggested to him to divert his thoughts; his gardening, his walks, his tame hares, his successive acquaintances with Lady Austen, Lady Hesketh, and the like all—this we know. What now concerns us is the present state and appearances of his homes and haunts here. To these the access is now easy. From the Wolverton station, on the Northwestern railway, an omnibus sets you down, after a run of nine miles, at the Bull Inn, in the spacious, still, and triangular market-place of Olney. Here, again, prints have made us most accurately acquainted with the place. The house occupied by Cowper stands near the eastern corner, loftily overtopping all the rest. There are the other quiet, cottage-like houses stretching away right and left, the tall elm-tree, the pump, the old octagon stone lock-up house. The house which was Cowper's makes an imposing appearance in a picture, and in reality is a building of considerable size. But it must always have been internally an ill-finished house. He himself, and his friends, compared it to a prison. It had no charms whatever of location. Opposite to it came crowding up some common dwellings; behind lay the garden, on a dead flat, and therefore with no attractions but such as art and a poet's imagination gave it. It was, for some years after he quitted it, inhabited by a surgeon. He has, in his turn, long left it; and it now is divided into three tenements. One is a little grocer's shop, the other part in front is an infant school, and the back part is a work-shop of some kind. The house is altogether dingy and desolate, and bears no marks of having at any time been finished in any superior style. That which was once the garden is now divided into a back yard and a small garden surrounded by a high stone wall. They show an apple-tree in it which they say Cowper planted. The other and main portion of the garden is cut off by the stone wall, and the access to it is from a distant part of the town. This garden is now in the possession of Mr. Morris, a master bootmaker, who, with a genuine feeling of respect for the poet's memory, not only retains it as much as possible in the state in which it was in Cowper's time, but has the most good-natured pleasure in allowing strangers to see it. The moment I presented myself at his door, he came out, anticipating my object, with the key, and proffered his own guidance. In the garden, about the center, still stands Cowper's summer-house. It is a little square tenement, as Cowper describes it himself in one of his letters, not much bigger than a sedan chair. It is of timber, framed, and plastered, and the roof of old red tiles. It has a wooden door on the side next to his own house, and a glass one, serving as window, exactly opposite, and looking across the next orchard to the parsonage. There is a bench on each side, and the ceiling is so low that a man of moderate stature can not stand upright in it. Except in hot weather, it must have been a regular wind-trap. It is all over, of course, written with verses, and inscribed with names. Around it stand evergreens, and in the garden remain various old fruit-trees, which were there in Cowper's time, and some of them, no doubt, planted by him. The back of some low cottages, with their windows level with the very earth, forms part of the boundary wall, and the orchard in front of the summer-house remains as in Cowper's time. It will be recollected that, in order to save himself the trouble of going round through the town, Cowper had a gate put out into this orchard, and another into the orchard of the Rectory, in which lived his friend Mr. Newton. He paid a pound a year for thus crossing his neighbor's orchard, but had, by this means, not only a very near cut to the parsonage opened to him, but a whole quiet territory of orchards. This still remains. A considerable extent of orchards, bounded, for the most part, by the backs of the town houses, presents a little quiet region in which the poet could ramble and muse at his own pleasure. The parsonage, a plain, modern, and not large building, is not very distant from the front of the summer-house, and over it peeps the church spire. One can not help reflecting how often the poet and his friends used to go to and fro there. Newton, with his genuine friendship for Cowper, but with his severe and predestinarian religion, which to Cowper's grieving spirit was terrifying and prostrating; then, a happy change, the lively, and affectionate, and witty Lady Austen, to whom we owe John Gilpin and the Task. Too lively, indeed, was this lady, charming as she was, for the nerves and the occupations of the poet. She went, and then came that delightful and true-souled cousin, Lady Hesketh, a sister, as Mary Unwin was a mother to the poet. She had lived much abroad, from the days in which Cowper and herself, merry companions, had laughed and loved each other dearly as cousins. The fame of him whom she had gone away deploring as blighted and lost forever, met her on her return to her native land, a widow; and with a heart and a purse equally open, she hastened to renew the intercourse of her youth, and to make the poet's life as happy as such hearts only could make him. There is nothing more delightful than to see how the bursting-forth fame of Cowper brought around him at once all his oldest and best friends—his kith and kin who had deemed him a wreck, and found him a gallant bark, sailing on the brightest sea of glory to a sacred immortality.
Lady Hesketh, active in her kindness as she was beautiful in person and in spirit, a true sisterly soul, lost no time in removing Cowper to a more suitable house and neighborhood. Of the house we have spoken. The situation of Olney is on the flat, near the River Ouse, and subject to its fogs. The town was dull. It is much now as it was then; one of those places that are the links between towns and villages. Its present population is only 2300. In such a place, therefore, every man knew all his neighbors' concerns. It was too exposed a sort of place for a man of Cowper's shy disposition, and yet had none of that bustle which gives a stimulus to get out of it into the country. Removing from it to the country was but passing from stillness to stillness. The country around Olney, moreover, is by no means striking in its features. It is like a thousand other parts of England, somewhat flat, yet somewhat undulating, and rather naked of trees. Weston, to which he now removed, was about a mile westward of Olney. It lies on higher ground, overlooking the valley of the Ouse. It is a small village, consisting of a few detached houses on each side of the road. The hall stood at this end, and the neat little church at the other. Trees grew along the street, and Cowper pronounced it one of the prettiest villages of England. Luckily, he had neither seen all the villages of England, nor the finest scenery of this or other countries. To him, therefore, the country was all that he imagined of lovely, and all that he desired. It never tired, it never lost its hold upon his fancy and his heart.
This he said of this scenery around Weston; and in setting out for that village from Olney, we take the track which, even before he went to live there, was his dayly and peculiarly favorite walk. Advancing out of Olney-street, we are at once on an open ascent on the highway. At a mile's distance before us lies Weston and its woods, its little church tower overlooking the valley of the Ouse. Behind us lies Olney, its tall church spire rising nobly into the sky; and close beneath it the Ouse emerges into sight, sweeping round the water-mills which figure in the poet's works, and then goes in several different streams, as he says, lazily along a fine stretch of green meadows, in which the scenes of "The Dog and Water-lily," and "The Poplar Field" occur. On this eminence stood Cowper often, with Mary Unwin on his arm, and thus he addresses her, as he describes most vividly the view:
We should not omit to notice that behind us, over Olney, shows itself the church tower and hall of Clifton, the attempt to walk to which forms the subject of Cowper's very humorous poem, The Distressed Travelers. Before us, as we advance—the Ouse meadows below on our left, and plain, naked farm-lands on our right—the park of Weston displays its lawns, and slopes, and fine masses of trees. It will be recollected by all lovers of Cowper that here lived Sir John and Lady Throckmorton, Cowper's kind and cordial friends, who, even before they knew him, threw open their park and all their domains to him; and who, when they did know him, did all that generous people of wealth and intelligence could do to contribute to his happiness. The village and estate here wholly belonged to them, and the hall was a second home to Cowper, always open to him with a warm welcome, and an easy, unassuming spirit of genuine friendship, Lady Throckmorton herself voluntarily becoming the transcriber of his Homer when his young friend Rose left him. In the whole of our literature there is no more beautiful instance of the intercourse of the literary man and his wealthy neighbors than that of Cowper and the Throckmortons. Their reward was the pleasure they conferred; and still more, the fame they have thus won.
The Throckmortons having other and extensive estates, the successors of Cowper's friends have deserted this. The house is pulled down, a wall is built across the bottom of the court-yard, which cuts off from view what was the garden. Grass grows thickly in the court, the entrance to which is still marked by the pillars of a gateway bearing vases. Across the court are erected a priest's house and Catholic chapel—the Throckmortons were and are Catholic—and beyond these still stand the stables, coach-house, &c., bearing a clock-tower, and showing that this was once a gentleman's residence. At the end of the old thatched out-building you see the word SCHOOL painted; it is the village school, Catholic, of course, as are all, or nearly all, the inhabitants. A pair of gateway pillars, like those which led to the house, mark the entrance to the village a little beyond the house. On the opposite side of the road to the house is the park, and directly opposite to the house, being taken out of the park, is the woodland wilderness in which Cowper so much delighted to ramble.
The village of Weston is a pretty village. The house of Cowper, Weston Lodge, stands on the right hand, about the center of it, forming a picturesque old orchard. The trees, which in his time stood in the street opposite, however, have been felled. A few doors on this side of the lodge is a public house, with the Yardley Oak upon its sign, and bearing the name of Cowper's Oak. The lodge, now inhabited by Mr. Swanwell, the steward, who very courteously allows the public to see it, is a good and pleasant, but not large house. It is well known by engravings. The vignette at the head of this article represents the tree opposite as still standing, which is not the fact, and the house wants shrubbery round it, by which its present aspect is much improved. The room on the right hand was Cowper's study. In his bed-room, which is at the back of the house overlooking the garden, there still remain two lines which he wrote when about to leave Weston for Norfolk, where he died. As his farewell to this place, the happiest of his life, when his own health, and that of his dear and venerable friend, Mrs. Unwin, were both failing, and gloomy feelings haunted him, these lines possess a deep interest. They are written on the bevel of a panel of one of the window-shutters, near the top right-hand corner, and when the shutter has been repainted, this part has been carefully excepted.
The words and dates stand just as here given, and mark his recurrence to these lines, and his restless state of mind, repeating the date of both month and year.
From this room Cowper used to have a view of his favorite shrubbery, and beyond it, up the hill, pleasant crofts. The shrubbery was generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, with gravel walks, and seats placed at appropriate distances. He gave a humorous account to Hayley of the erection of one of these arbors: "I said to Sam, 'Sam, build me a shed in the garden with any thing you can find, and make it rude and rough, like one of those at Eartham.' 'Yes, sir,' says Sam; and straightway laying his own noddle and the carpenter's together, has built me a thing fit for Stowe Gardens. Is not this vexatious? I threaten to inscribe it thus:
All this garden has now been altered. A yard has been made behind, with outbuildings, and the garden cut off with a brick wall.
Not far from this house a narrow lane turns up, inclosed on one side by the park wall. Through this old stone wall, now well crowned with masses of ivy, there used to be a door, of which Cowper had a key, which let him at once into the wilderness. In this wilderness, which is a wood grown full of underwood, through which walks are cut winding in all directions, you come upon what is called the Temple. This is an open Gothic alcove, having in front an open space, scattered with some trees, among them a fine old acacia, and closed in by the thick wood. Here Cowper used to sit much, delighted with the perfect and deep seclusion. The temple is now fast falling to decay. Through a short winding walk to the left you come out to the park, which is separated from the wilderness by a sunk fence. A broad grass walk runs along the head of this fosse, between it and the wilderness, and here you find the two urns under the trees, which mark the grave of two favorite dogs of the Throckmortons', for which Cowper condescended to write epitaphs, which still remain, and may be found in his poems. There is also a figure of a lion, couchant, on a pedestal, bearing this inscription: "Mortuo Leone etiam Lepores insultant, 1815."
From this point also runs out the fine lime avenue, of at least a quarter of a mile long, terminated by the alcove. Every scene, and every spot of ground which presents itself here, is to be found in Cowper's poetry, particularly in the first book of his Task—The Sofa. The Sofa was but a hook to hang his theme upon; his real theme is his walk all through this park and its neighborhood, particularly this fine avenue, closing its boughs above with all the solemn and inspiring grace of a Gothic cathedral aisle. To the right the park descends in a verdant slope, scattered with noble trees. There, in the valley, near the road to Olney, is the Spinny, with its rustic moss-house, haunted by Cowper, and where he wrote those verses, full of the deepest, saddest melancholy which ever oppressed a guiltless heart, beginning,
There, too, in the valley, but where it has freed itself from the wood, is the Rustic Bridge, equally celebrated by him; and beyond it, in the fields, the Peasant's Nest, now grown from a laborer's cottage, shrouded in trees, to a considerable farm-house, with its ricks and buildings, conspicuous on an open eminence. Still beyond are the woods of Yardley Chase, including those of Kilwick and Dinglebury, well known to the readers of Cowper; and this old chase stretches away for four or five miles toward Castle Ashby. In traversing the park to reach the woods and Yardley Oak, we come into a genuinely agricultural region, where a sort of peopled solitude is enjoyed. Swelling, rounded eminences, with little valleys winding between them; here and there a farm-house of the most rustic description; the plow and its whistling follower turning up the ruddy soil; and the park, displaying from its hills and dells its contrast of nobly umbrageous trees, showed where Cowper had often delighted himself, and whence he had drawn much of his imagery:
At this point of view you find the poet's praises of the scenery more fully justified than any where else. The park here has a solemn, solitary, splendidly wooded air, and spreads its green slopes, and gives hints of its secluded dells, that are piquant to the imagination. And still the walk, of a mile or more, to the ancient chase, is equally impressive. The vast extent of the forest which stretches before you gives a deep feeling of silence and ancient repose. You descend into a valley, and Kilwick's echoing wood spreads itself before you on the upland. You pass through it, and come out opposite to a lonely farm-house, where, in the opening of the forest, you see the remains of very ancient oaks standing here and there. You feel that you are on a spot that has maintained its connection with the world of a thousand years ago; and amid these venerable trees, you soon see the one which by its bulk, its hollow trunk, and its lopped and dilapidated crown, needs not to be pointed out as the Yardley Oak. Here Cowper was fond of coming, and sitting within the hollow boll for hours; around him stretching the old woods, with their solitude and the cries of woodland birds. The fame which he has conferred on this tree has nearly proved its destruction. Whole arms and great pieces of its trunk have been cut away with knife, and ax, and saw, to prepare different articles from. The Marquis of Northampton, to whom the chase belongs, has had multitudes of nails driven in to stop the progress of this destruction, but finding that not sufficient, has affixed a board bearing this inscription: "Out of respect to the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of Northampton is particularly desirous of preserving this oak. Notice is hereby given, that any person defacing, or otherwise injuring it, will be prosecuted according to law." In stepping round the Yardley Oak, it appeared to me to be, at the foot, about thirteen yards in circumference.
Every step here shows you some picture sketched by Cowper:
We are now upon
The old wild chase opens its glades, discovers its heaths, startles us with its abrupt cries of birds, or plunges us into the gloom of thick, overshadowing oaks. It is a fit haunt of the poet. Such are the haunts of Cowper in this neighborhood. Amid these he led a secluded, but an active and most important life. How many of those who bustle along in the front of public life can boast of a ten-thousandth part of the benefit to their fellow-men which was conferred, and for ages will be conferred, by the loiterer of these woods and fields? In no man was his own doctrine ever made more manifest, that
He says of himself,
Thus he began; but soothed by the sweet freshness of nature, strengthened by her peace, enlightened to the pitch of true wisdom by her daily converse, spite of all his griefs and fears, he ended by describing himself, in one of the noblest passages of modern poetry, as the happy man.
Quitting these scenes in quest of health, both the poet and his dear friend Mary Unwin died at Dereham, in Suffolk, she in 1796, and he in 1800. "They were lovely in their lives, and in death they are not divided."
Perhaps no writer of merit has been more neglected by her own friends than Mrs. Tighe. With every means of giving to the public a good memoir of her, I believe no such is in existence; at all events, I have not been able to find one. The following brief particulars have been furnished by a private hand: "Mrs. Tighe was born in Dublin in 1774. Her father, the Rev. Wm. Blachford, was librarian of Marsh's library, St. Sepulchre, in that city. Her mother, Theodosia Tighe, was one of a family whose seat has been, and is, Rosanna, county Wicklow. In 1793, Miss Blachford, then but nineteen, married her cousin, Henry Tighe, of Woodstock, M.P. for Kilkenny in the Irish Parliament, and author of a County History of Kilkenny. Consumption was hereditary in Mrs. Tighe's family, and its fatal seeds ripened with her womanhood. She was constantly afflicted with its attendants, languor, depression, and want of appetite. With the profits of Psyche, which ran through four editions previous to her death, she built an addition to the Orphan Asylum in Wicklow, thence called the Psyche Ward. She died on the 24th of March, 1810, and was buried at Woodstock, in Kilkenny, beneath a monument chiseled by Flaxman from the finest marble of Italy. Mrs. Hemans, Banim, and Moore have done homage to her genius, or lamented over its eclipse. North, in the Noctes Ambrosianæ, with the assistance of Mr. Timothy Tickler, has paid her a very high compliment. But her abilities, her beauty, and her virtue have not, as yet, been adequately pictured in any biographical notice of her that I have seen. The 1813 edition of Psyche contains some affecting allusions to her, in the preface written by her husband, who soon after followed her to the grave."
How little is known of Mrs. Tighe, when so short an account is the best that a countryman of hers can furnish! and even in that there are serious errors. So far from her monument being of the finest marble of Italy, it is of a stone not finer than Portland stone, if so fine. So far from her husband soon following her to the grave, Mrs. Tighe died in 1810, and her husband was living at the time of Mrs. Hemans's visit to Woodstock in 1831. He must have survived her above twenty years. In Mrs. Hemans's own account of her visit to Woodstock, she speaks of it as the place where "Mrs. Tighe passed the latest years of her life, and near where she is buried;" yet in the same volume with Psyche (1811 edition, p. 306) there is a "Sonnet, written at Woodstock, in the county of Kilkenny, the seat of William Tighe, June 30, 1809," i. e., but nine months before her death. For myself, I confess myself ignorant of the facts which might connect these strangely-clashing accounts of a popular poetess, of a wealthy family, and who died little more than thirty years ago. I hoped to gain the necessary information on the spot, which I made a long journey to visit purposely. Why I did not, remains to tell.
The poem of Psyche was one which charmed me intensely at an early age. There was a tone of deep and tender feeling pervading it, which touched the youthful heart, and took possession of every sensibility. There was a tone of melancholy music in it, which seemed the regretful expression of the consciousness of a not far-off death. It was now well known that the young and beautiful poetess was dead. The life which she lived—crowned with every good and grace that God confers on the bright ones of the earth, on those who are to be living revelations of the heaven to which we are called, and to which they are hastening, youth, beauty, fortune, all glorified by the emanations of a transcendent mind, was snatched away, and there was a sad fascination thrown over both her fate and her work. The delicacy, the pathos, the subdued and purified, yet intense passion of the poem, were all calculated to seize on the kindred spirit of youth, and to make you in love with the writer. She came before the imagination in the combined witchery of brilliant genius and the pure loveliness of a seraph, which had but touched upon the earth on some celestial mission, and was gone forever. Her own Psyche, in the depth of her saddest hour, yearning for the restoration of the lost heaven and the lost heart, was not more tenderly beautiful to the imagination than herself.
Such was the effect of the Psyche on the glowing, sensitive, yet immature mind. How much of this effect has, in many cases, been the result of the quick feelings and magnifying fancy of youth itself! We have returned to our idol in later years, and found it clay. But this is not the case with Psyche. After the lapse of many years, after the disenchanting effects of experience, after the enjoyment of a vast quantity of new poetry of a splendor and power such as no one age of the world ever before witnessed, we return to the poem of Mrs. Tighe, and still find it full of beauty. There is a graceful fluency of diction, a rich and deep harmony, that are the fitting vehicle of a story full of interest, and scenery full of enchantment. Spite of the incongruity of ingrafting on a Grecian fable the knight-errantry of the Middle Ages, and the allegory of still later days, we follow the deeply-tried Psyche through all her ordeals with unabating zest. The radiant Island of Pleasure, the more radiant Divinity of Love, the fatal curiosity, the weeping and outcast Psyche wandering on through the forests and wildernesses of her earthly penance, the mysterious knight, the intrepid squire of the starry brow, are all sketched with the genuine pencil of poetry, and we follow the fortunes of the wanderers with ever-deepening entrancement. None but Spenser himself has excelled Mrs. Tighe in the field of allegory. Passion in the form of the lion subdued by the knight; Psyche betrayed by Vanity and Flattery to Ambition; the Bower of Loose Delight; the Attacks of Slander; the Castle of Suspicion; the Court of Spleen; the drear Island of Indifference; and the final triumph and apotheosis of the gentle soul—all are vigorously conceived, and executed with a living distinctness. The pleasure with which she pursued her task is expressed in the graceful opening stanzas of the fifth canto.