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, made more vivid by the sight of the broken garter, saw at once that all thought of the appointment was at end, and carried away the instrument of nomination.  Let those whom despondency assails read this passage of Cowper’s life, and remember that he lived to write John Gilpin and The Task.

Cowper tells us that “to this moment he had felt no concern of a spiritual kind;” that “ignorant of original sin, insensible of the guilt of actual transgression, he understood neither the Law nor the Gospel, the condemning nature of the one, nor the restoring mercies of the other.”  But after attempting suicide he was seized, as he well might be, with religious horrors.  Now it was that he began to ask himself whether he had been guilty of the unpardonable sin, and was presently persuaded that he had, though it would be vain to inquire what he imagined the unpardonable sin to be.  In this mood, he fancied that if there was any balm for him in Gilead, it would be found in the ministrations of his friend Martin Madan, an Evangelical clergyman of high repute, whom he had been wont to regard as an enthusiast.  His Cambridge brother, John, the translator of the Henriade, seems to have had some philosophic doubts as to the efficacy of the proposed remedy; but, like a philosopher, he consented to the experiment.  Mr. Madan came and ministered, but in that distempered soul his balm turned to poison; his religious conversations only fed the horrible illusion.  A set of English Sapphics, written by Cowper at this time, and expressing his despair, were unfortunately preserved; they are a ghastly play of the poetic faculty in a mind utterly deprived of self-control, and amidst the horrors of inrushing madness.  Diabolical, they might be termed more truly than religious.