when Cowper was taking his solitary walk beneath the trees.  Under the influence of religious sympathy the acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship; Cowper at once became one of the Unwin circle, and soon afterwards, a vacancy being made by the departure of one of the pupils, he became a boarder in the house.  This position he had passionately desired on religious grounds; but in truth he might well have desired it on economical grounds also, for he had begun to experience the difficulty and expensiveness, as well as the loneliness, of bachelor housekeeping, and financial deficit was evidently before him.  To Mrs. Unwin he was from the first strongly drawn.  “I met Mrs. Unwin in the street,” he says, “and went home with her.  She and I walked together near two hours in the garden, and had a conversation which did me more good than I should have received from an audience with the first prince in Europe.  That woman is a blessing to me, and I never see her without being the better for her company.”  Mrs. Unwin’s character is written in her portrait with its prim but pleasant features; a Puritan and a precisian she was, but she was not morose or sour, and she had a boundless capacity for affection.  Lady Hesketh, a woman of the world, and a good judge in every respect, says of her at a later period, when she had passed with Cowper through many sad and trying years:  “She is very far from grave; on the contrary, she is cheerful and gay, and laughs de bon coeur upon the smallest provocation.  Amidst all the little puritanical words which fall from her de temps en temps, she seems to have by nature a quiet fund of gaiety; great indeed must it have been, not to have been wholly overcome by the close confinement in which she has lived, and the anxiety she must have undergone for one whom she certainly loves as well as one human being can love another.  I will not say she idolizes him, because that she would think wrong; but she certainly seems to possess the truest regard and affection for this excellent creature, and, as I said before, has in the most literal sense of those words, no will or shadow of inclination but what is his.  My account of Mrs. Unwin may seem perhaps to you, on comparing my letters, contradictory; but when you consider that I began to write at the first moment that I saw her, you will not wonder.  Her character develops itself by degrees; and though I might lead you to suppose her grave and melancholy, she is not so by any means.  When she speaks upon grave subjects, she does express herself with a puritanical tone, and in puritanical expressions, but on all subjects she seems to have a great disposition to cheerfulness and mirth; and indeed had she not, she could not have gone through all she has.  I must say, too, that she seems to be very well read in the English poets, as appears by several little quotations, which she makes from time to time, and has a true taste for what is excellent in that way.”