of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an
attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every
morning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his
amusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the
departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener.
"I draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and
dab-chicks." He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian
lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are
not Christians:

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and
viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what
are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a
man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a
brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be
able to say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!" Their
eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have
been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine
estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian
garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse
upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four
lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be
worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's
gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I
have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it
air, I say to myself: "This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me
for the present; I must leave it soon."

In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and
more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "The
necessity of amusement," he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes me
sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a
gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ...
surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it
two months ago." His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an
impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "I have
no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of
mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.... Such a talent in verse as mine