them justice, though from a rather too theological point of view.  Seclusion from the sinful world was as much a part of the system of Mr. Newton, as it was of the system of Saint Benedict.  Cowper was almost entirely cut off from intercourse with his friends and people of his own class.  He dropped his correspondence even with his beloved cousin, Lady Hesketh, and would probably have dropped his correspondence with Hill, had not Hill’s assistance in money matters been indispensable.  To complete his mental isolation it appears that having sold his library he had scarcely any books.  Such a course of Christian happiness as this could only end in one way; and Newton himself seems to have had the sense to see that a storm was brewing, and that there was no way of conjuring it but by contriving some more congenial occupation.  So the disciple was commanded to employ his poetical gifts in contributing to a hymnbook which Newton was compiling.  Cowper’s Olney hymns have not any serious value as poetry.  Hymns rarely have.  The relations of man with Deity transcend and repel poetical treatment.  There is nothing in them on which the creative imagination can be exercised.  Hymns can be little more than incense of the worshipping soul.  Those of the Latin church are the best; not because they are better poetry than the rest (for they are not), but because their language is the most sonorous.  Cowper’s hymns were accepted by the religious body for which they were written, as expressions of its spiritual feeling and desires; so far they were successful.  They are the work of a religious man of culture, and free from anything wild, erotic, or unctuous.  But on the other hand there is nothing in them suited to be the vehicle of lofty devotion, nothing, that we can conceive a multitude or even a prayer-meeting uplifting to heaven with voice and heart.  Southey has pointed to some passages on which the shadow of the advancing malady falls; but in the main there is a predominance of religious joy and hope.  The most despondent hymn of the series is Temptation, the thought of which resembles that of The Castaway.

Cowper’s melancholy may have been aggravated by the loss of his only brother, who died about this time, and at whose death-bed he was present; though in the narrative which he wrote, joy at John’s conversion and the religious happiness of his end seems to exclude the feelings by which hypochondria was likely to be fed.  But his mode of life under Newton was enough to account for the return of his disease, which in this sense may be fairly laid to the charge of religion.  He again went mad, fancied as before that he was rejected of heaven, ceased to pray as one helplessly doomed, and again attempted suicide.  Newton and Mrs. Unwin at first treated the disease as a diabolical visitation, and “with deplorable consistency,” to borrow the phrase used by one of their friends in the case of Cowper’s desperate abstinence from prayer, abstained from calling