I was a stricken deer that left the herd
  Long since; with many an arrow deep infixed
  My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
  To seek a tranquil death in distant shades,
  There was I found by one who had himself
  Been hurt by the archers.  In his side he bore
  And in his hands and feet the cruel scars,
  With gentle force soliciting the darts,
  He drew them forth and healed and bade me live.

Cowper thought for a moment of taking orders, but his dread of appearing in public conspired with the good sense which lay beneath his excessive sensibility to put a veto on the design.  He, however, exercised the zeal of a neophyte in proselytism to a greater extent than his own judgment and good taste approved when his enthusiasm had calmed down.

CHAPTER III.

AT OLNEY—­MR. NEWTON.

Cowper had not been two years with the Unwins when Mr. Unwin, the father, was killed by a fall from his horse; this broke up the household.  But between Cowper and Mrs. Unwin an indissoluble tie had been formed.  It seems clear, notwithstanding Southey’s assertion to the contrary, that they at one time meditated marriage, possibly as a propitiation to the evil tongues which did not spare even this most innocent connexion; but they were prevented from fulfilling their intention by a return of Cowper’s malady.  They became companions for life.  Cowper says they were as mother and son to each other; but Mrs. Unwin was only seven years older than he.  To label their connexion is impossible, and to try to do it would be a platitude.  In his poems Cowper calls Mrs. Unwin Mary; she seems always to have called him Mr. Cowper.  It is evident that her son, a strictly virtuous and religious man, never had the slightest misgiving about his mother’s position.

The pair had to choose a dwelling-place; they chose Olney in Buckinghamshire, on the Ouse.  The Ouse was “a slow winding river,” watering low meadows, from which crept pestilential fogs.  Olney was a dull town, or rather village, inhabited by a population of lace-makers, ill-paid, fever-stricken, and for the most part as brutal as they were poor.  There was not a woman in the place excepting Mrs. Newton with whom Mrs. Unwin could associate, or to whom she could look for help in sickness or other need.  The house in which the pair took up their abode was dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down; when they left it, the competitors for the succession were a cobbler and a publican.  It looked upon the Market Place, but it was in the close neighbourhood of Silver End, the worst part of Olney.  In winter the cellars were full of water.  There were no pleasant walks within easy reach, and in winter Cowper’s only exercise was pacing thirty yards of gravel, with the dreary supplement of dumb-bells.  What was the attraction to this “well,” this “abyss,” as Cowper himself called it, and as, physically and socially, it was?