for he
encouraged his friend to smoke in the famous Summer House at Olney,
which was the poet's outdoor study. Bull smoked Orinoco tobacco, which
he carried in one of the tobacco-boxes, which in those days were much
more commonly used than pouches, and this box on one occasion he
accidentally left behind him at Olney. Cowper returned it to him with
the well-known rhymed epistle dated June 22, 1782, and beginning:

_If reading verse be your delight,
'Tis mine as much, or more, to write;
But what we would, so weak is man,
Lies oft remote from what we can._

He describes the box and its contents in lines which show not only
tolerance but appreciation of tobacco, from which it is not
unreasonable to infer that Cowper's first view of his friend's
smoking-habit as a drawback--as shown in his letter to Unwin, quoted
above--had been modified by neighbourhood and custom. It might have
been well for the poet himself if he had learned to smoke a social
pipe with his friend Bull. The appreciative lines run thus:

_This oval box well filled
With best tobacco, finely milled,
Beats all Anticyra's pretences
To disengage the encumbered senses.
O Nymph of transatlantic fame,
Where'er thine haunt, whate'er thy name,
Whether reposing on the side
Of Oronoco's spacious tide,
Or listening with delight not small
To Niagara's distant fall,
'Tis thine to cherish and to feed
The pungent nose-refreshing weed,
Which, whether pulverized it gain
A speedy passage to the brain,
Or whether, touched with fire, it rise
In circling eddies to the skies,
Does thought more quicken and refine
Than all the breath of all the Nine--
Forgive the bard, if bard he be,
Who once too wantonly made free,
To touch with a satiric wipe
That symbol of thy power, the pipe;
* * * * * * *
And so may smoke-inhaling Bull
Be always filling, never full._

The allusion in these verses to a "satiric wipe" refers to a passage
in the poem entitled "Conversation," which Cowper had written in the
previous year, 1781. In this passage tobacco is abused in terms which
Cowper clearly felt to need modification after his personal
intercourse with such a smoker as his friend Bull. In describing, in
"Conversation," the manner in which a story is sometimes told, the
poet says:

_The pipe, with solemn interposing puff,
Makes half