“My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine.  He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask to eternity.  So if the god is content with it, we must even wonder at his taste, and be so too.

  “Adieu! my dearest, dearest cousin. 
    W. C.”

Here, by way of contrast, is a letter written in the lowest spirits possible to Mr. Newton.  It displays literary grace inalienable even in the depths of hypochondria.  It also shows plainly the connexion of hypochondria with the weather.  January was a month to the return of which the sufferer always looked forward with dread as a mysterious season of evil.  It was a season, especially at Olney, of thick fog combined with bitter frosts.  To Cowper this state of the atmosphere appeared the emblem of his mental state; we see in it the cause.  At the close the letter slides from spiritual despair to the worsted-merchant, showing that, as we remarked before, the language of despondency had become habitual, and does not always flow from a soul really in the depths of woe.

  TO THE REV.  JOHN NEWTON.

  “Jan. 13th, 1784.

“MY DEAR FRIEND,—­I too have taken leave of the old year, and parted with it just when you did, but with very different sentiments and feelings upon the occasion.  I looked back upon all the passages and occurrences of it, as a traveller looks back upon a wilderness through which he has passed with weariness, and sorrow of heart, reaping no other fruit, of his labour, than the poor consolation that, dreary as the desert was, he has left it all behind him.  The traveller would find even this comfort considerably lessened, if, as soon as he had passed one wilderness, another of equal length, and equally desolate, should expect him.  In this particular, his experience and mine would exactly tally.  I should rejoice, indeed, that the old year is over and gone, if I had not every reason to prophesy a new one similar to it.

“The new year is already old in my account, I am not, indeed, sufficiently second-sighted to be able to boast by anticipation an acquaintance with the events of it yet unborn, but rest convinced that, be they what they may, not one of them comes a messenger of good to me.  If even death itself should be of the number, he is no friend of mine.  It is an alleviation of the woes even of an unenlightened man, that he can wish for death, and indulge a hope, at least, that in death he shall find deliverance.  But, loaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended.  For, more unhappy than the traveller with whom I set out, pass through what difficulties I may, through whatever dangers and afflictions, I am not a whit nearer the home, unless a dungeon may be called so.