His letters she preserved till her death in extreme old age.
In 1756 Cowper's father died.

There does not seem to have been much intercourse between them, nor does the son in after-years speak with any deep feeling of his loss: possibly his complaint in _Tirocinium_ of the effect of boarding-schools, in estranging children from their parents, may have had some reference to his own case.

His local affections, however, were very strong, and he felt with unusual keenness the final parting from his old home, and the pang of thinking that strangers usurp our dwelling and the familiar places will know us no more.
Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine have trod my nursery floor; And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd.
'Tis now become a history little known, That once we call'd the pastoral house our own.
Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held.

Of the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose birth had cost their mother's life.
When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the sad and decisive crisis of his life.

He went mad and attempted suicide.
What was the source of his madness?
There is a vague tradition that it arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of insanity.