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Altogether, if we have found in the neighbourhood of Bedford no Delectable Mountains, nor Valley of Humiliation, nor Land of Beulah, we have at least seen much pleasant English scenery, a fertile, well-cultivated country, and in the very absence of more outwardly exciting prospects, have had the more “leisure of thought” to dwell in the ideal world which Bunyan has made as familiar to us as our own home.
From Bedford to Olney the distance by rail is between ten and eleven miles; by “the sinuous Ouse” probably between thirty and forty.
Few travellers, therefore, will care to ascend by the river banks, and the frequent shallows preclude the thought of a boating excursion, which otherwise would by its leisurely length be some preparation for our exchange of the associations of the seventeenth century for those of the eighteenth. One hundred and three years separated the birthday of Bunyan from that of Cowper.
The interval marks the greatest advance that had ever been made in the history of English thought and freedom. But in the essentials of faith and teaching the two men were one; nor in some of their experiences were they very dissimilar. Both were sensitive, conscientious, and often in the midst of their holiest longings after God were most terror-stricken by thoughts of the wrath to come. Some pages of Bunyan’s Autobiography may compare in their passionate anxiety with the annals of Cowper’s despair. The great dreamer soon escaped from Doubting Castle to the Delectable Mountains; but for the poet, the dungeon bars remained unloosed until the final summons came to the everlasting hills.*
The sensitiveness of Cowper to external influences was so great, as to raise the doubt whether other scenes and a different atmosphere might not have prevented many of his sorrows.
On the death of his father, when the poet had reached the age of twenty-five, he touchingly and expressively tells us that it had never till then occurred to him “that a parson has no fee-simple in the house and glebe he occupies. There was,” he says, “neither tree, nor gate, nor stile in all that country to which I did not feel a relation, and the house itself I preferred to a palace.” To Huntingdon, where he first made acquaintance with the Ouse, and became an inmate with the Unwins, he clung very lovingly, although he does not rate the charms of the neighbourhood very highly. “My lot is cast in a country where we have neither woods nor commons nor pleasant prospects: all flat and insipid; in the summer adorned only winter covered with a flood.” But it was at Olney that Cowper found such scenery as he could appreciate and love. “He does not,” in the words of Sir James Mackintosh, “describe the most beautiful scenes in nature; he discovers what is most beautiful in ordinary scenes.”
In fact, Cowper saw very few beautiful scenes, but his poetical eye, and his moral heart, detected beauty in the sandy flats of Buckinghamshire.” The walk, especially, from the quiet little town to the village of Weston Underwood, he has made classic among English scenes by the description in the first book of the Task.
Leaving Olney, where, in truth, there is not much to detain us, save the poet’s home—the same in outward aspect, at least, as during the twenty years spent by him within its walls,—and the summer-house in the garden where he sat and wrote, while Mrs. Unwin knitted, and Puss, Tiny, and Bess sported upon the grass—we may climb the little eminence above the river, and with an admiration like that of the poet ninety years ago, “dwell upon the scene.” “Here is the “distant plough slow moving,” and
Notes
* “From the moment of Cowper’s death, till the coffin was closed,” writes his friend and relative Mr. Johnson, “the expression with which his countenance had settled was that of calmness and composure, mingled, as it were, with holy surprise.”—Southey’s Life.