His judgment in its healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it.

To the malady which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English poets.
At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with.

Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present.

In short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint, in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good poetry.

But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.
The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at the same time very much in need of him.