There was nothing for it but a madhouse.  The sufferer was consigned to the private asylum of Dr. Cotton, at St. Alban’s.  An ill-chosen physician Dr. Cotton would have been, if the malady had really had its source in religion; for he was himself a pious man, a writer of hymns, and was in the habit of holding religious intercourse with his patients.  Cowper, after his recovery, speaks of that intercourse with the keenest pleasure and gratitude; so that in the opinion of the two persons best qualified to judge, religion in this case was not the bane.  Cowper has given us a full account of his recovery.  It was brought about, as we can plainly see, by medical treatment wisely applied; but it came in the form of a burst of religious faith and hope.  He rises one morning feeling better; grows cheerful over his breakfast, takes up the Bible, which in his fits of madness he always threw aside, and turns to a verse in the Epistle to the Romans.  “Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me.  I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon in His blood, and the fulness and completeness of His justification.  In a moment I believed and received the Gospel.”  Cotton at first mistrusted the sudden change, but he was at length satisfied, pronounced his patient cured, and discharged him from the asylum, after a detention of eighteen months.  Cowper hymned his deliverance in The Happy Change, as in the hideous Sapphics he had given religious utterance to his despair.

  The soul, a dreary province once
  Of Satan’s dark domain,
  Feels a new empire form’d within,
  And owns a heavenly reign.

  The glorious orb whose golden beams
  The fruitful year control,
  Since first obedient to Thy word,
  He started from the goal,

  Has cheer’d the nations with the joys
  His orient rays impart;
  But’, Jesus, ’tis Thy light alone
  Can shine upon the heart.

Once for all, the reader of Cowper’s life must make up his mind to acquiesce in religious forms of expression.  If he does not sympathize with them, he will recognize them as phenomena of opinion, and bear them like a philosopher.  He can easily translate them into the language of psychology, or even of physiology, if he thinks fit.

CHAPTER II.

AT HUNTINGDON—­THE UNWINS.

The storm was over; but it had swept away a great part of Cowper’s scanty fortune, and almost all his friends.  At thirty-five he was stranded and desolate.  He was obliged to resign a Commissionership of Bankruptcy which he held, and little seems to have remained to him but the rent of his chambers in the Temple.  A return to his profession was, of course, out of the question.  His relations, however, combined to make up a little income for him, though from a hope of his family, he had become a melancholy