"The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!"

From Patrick Kurp's "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also" on William Cowper:

Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful:

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

Cowper’s metaphors often mingle playfulness and precision. A bauble is a plaything, a toy or trinket. Cowper finds in them an endorsement of his faith.

Patrick Kurp, "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also," Anecdotal Evidence, May 3, 2026.