William Cowper

William Cowper trained for the law and broke down completely at thirty-one, facing an examination he could not bear; he attempted his own life more than once and was placed in an asylum at St Albans. There, reading Romans, he came to a settled peace, and afterward went to live at Olney where the ex-slave-trader John Newton was curate. Newton put him to work writing hymns as therapy and as friendship, and the collection they published together carries sixty-eight of Cowper's - among them the lines about the fountain and the ones about God moving in a mysterious way, written in the shadow of another collapse. The darkness came back and stayed: from 1773 he believed himself uniquely damned, would rarely enter a church again, and yet went on writing - the long poems that made him the most admired English poet of his day, verses the abolitionists printed as broadsides, and letters that are still read for their humor. He died in 1800, still afraid.