Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the description of his progress to the dame-school in the lines,
On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture : ?
The Gardener Robin, says he?
Day by day drew me to school along the public way) Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped. The site of the school to which Cowper was drawn by Robert Pope, to give Robin his full name, is still pointed out. Who does not remember, too, the allusions to the tenderness of his mother ?
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou mightest know me safe and warmly laid; Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, The biscuit, or confectionery plum, All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love that knew no fall. An equally pleasant picture is that of the little William standing at his mother’s side and pricking the pattern of her dress into paper.
When playing with thy vesture’s tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I pricked them into paper with a pin, And thou wast happier than myself the while, Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile.‘1 In order to understand this, we must remember that a lady’s dress in those days consisted, beside the gown proper, of a pair of folds reaching from the waist to the feet, and it was with these folds that children were wont to amuse themselves in the way related. Since the childhood of Cowper many changes have- naturally taken place in the town and neighbourhood of Berkhamsted, but it is still a pleasant spot, the scenery being picturesque and even luxuriant. On the left, as it is approached from London (distant about twenty-eight miles) by the North Western Railway, is- seen the canal,
with locks and lock-keepers’ white cottages, the high road about a field’s length, and the u…