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 was an outdoor as well as an indoor man.  The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills.  Nevertheless Cowper’s natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson’s. The Task reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.  In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English Church.  John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper’s conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper’s first volume of Table Talk and other poems, 1782, written under Newton’s inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and theaters.  “God made the country and man made the town,” he wrote.  He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse.  Byron called him a “coddled poet.”  And, indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him.  He lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy.  But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a charming playful humor—­displayed in his excellent comic ballad John Gilpin; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him,