n which I am oftener seen
than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot."
"My thoughts," he informed the Rev. John Newton, "are clad in a sober
livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but
his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged or
in a white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anything
from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish
toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch,
which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or a
cuckoo-clock. He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last of
these. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock
was striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and
travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. He never ventured outside
England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties.
"I have lived much at Southampton," boasted at the age of sixty, "have
slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of
Weymouth." That was his grand tour. He made a journey to Eastham, near
Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove
with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a little
daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of
which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs." He went on a visit to some
relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady
Hesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more. I have been tossed like
a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me." Who but
the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far
country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussex
downs?

"We are strange creatures, my little friend," Cowper once wrote to
Christopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though
half that we do seems to be push-pin." Here we see one of the main reasons
of Cowper's eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during most of
his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom.
He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with
thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for
the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not
of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If h