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from the beginning. I hope (for Mary see, from the above awkward playfulness of I can answer)-but I hope that I shall fancy, that my spirits are not quite depressed. through life never have less recollection, nor I should ill deserve God's blessings, which, a fainter impression, of what has happened since the late terrible event, have come down than I have now. 'Tis not a light thing, nor in mercy upon us, if I indulged regret or meant by the Almighty to be received querulousness. Mary continues serene and lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and cheerful. I have not by me a little letter deeply religious through life; and by such she wrote to me; for, though I see her means may both of us escape madness in almost every day, yet we delight to write to future, if it so please the Almighty! one another, for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the people of the house. I have not the letter by me, but will quote from memory what she wrote in it: 'I have no bad terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the

"Send me word how it fares with Sara. I repeat it, your letter was, and will be, an inestimable treasure to me. You have a view of what my situation demands of me, like my own view, and I trust a just

one.

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Coleridge, continue to write; but do not for ever offend me by talking of sending me cash. Sincerely, and on my soul, we do not want it. God love you both.

"I will write again very soon. Do you Almighty has given me. I shall see her write directly."

As Lamb recovered from the shock of his own calamity, he found comfort in gently admonishing his friend on that imbecility of purpose which attended the development of his mighty genius. His next letter, commencing with this office of friendship, soon reverts to the condition of that sufferer, who was endeared to him the more because others shrank from and forsook her.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"October 17th, 1796.

again in heaven; she will then understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me better, and will then say no more, as she used to do, 'Polly, what are those poor crazy moythered brains of yours thinking of always?' Poor Mary! my mother indeed never understood her right. She loved her, as she loved us all, with a mother's love; but in opinion, in feeling, and sentiment, and disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her right; never could believe how much she loved her; but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection, too frequently with coldness and "My dearest Friend,-I grieve from my repulse. Still she was a good mother. God very soul to observe you in your plans of forbid I should think of her but most respectlife, veering about from this hope to the fully, most affectionately. Yet she would other, and settling nowhere. Is it an un- always love my brother above Mary, who toward fatality (speaking humanly) that was not worthy of one-tenth of that affection does this for you-a stubborn, irresistible which Mary had a right to claim. But it is concurrence of events—or lies the fault, as my sister's gratifying recollection, that every I fear it does, in your own mind? You seem act of duty and of love she could pay, every to be taking up splendid schemes of fortune kindness, (and I speak true, when I say to only to lay them down again; and your the hurting of her health, and most probably fortunes are an ignis fatuus that has been in great part to the derangement of her conducting you, in thought, from Lancaster- senses) through a long course of infirmities court, Strand, to somewhere near Matlock; and sickness, she could show her, she ever then jumping across to Dr. Somebody's, did. I will, some day, as I promised, enlarge whose son's tutor you were likely to be; to you upon my sister's excellences; 'twill and, would to God, the dancing demon may seem like exaggeration, but I will do it. At conduct you at last, in peace and comfort, to present, short letters suit my state of mind the 'life and labours of a cottager.' You best. So take my kindest wishes for your

comfort and establishment in life, and for Sara's welfare and comforts with you. God love you. God love us all.

"C. LAMB."

Miss Lamb's gradual restoration to comfort, and her brother's earnest watchfulness over it, are illustrated in the following frag

ment of a letter:

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"October 28th, 1796.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"December 2nd, 1796.

"I have delayed writing thus long, not having by me my copy of your poems, which I had lent. I am not satisfied with all your intended omissions. Why omit 40, 63, 84? above all, let me protest strongly against your rejecting the 'Complaint of Ninathoma,' 86. The words, I acknowledge, are Ossian's, but you have added to them the 'music of Caril.' If a vicarious substitute be wanting, sacrifice (and 'twill be a piece of self-denial too), the 'Epitaph on an Infant,' of which its author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or, if your heart be set on perpetuating the fourline wonder, I'll tell you what do; sell the copyright of it at once to a country statuary; commence in this manner Death's prime poet-laureate; and let your verses be adopted in every village round, instead of those hitherto famous ones:

"I have satisfaction in being able to bid you rejoice with me in my sister's continued reason, and composedness of mind. Let us both be thankful for it. I continue to visit her very frequently, and the people of the house are vastly indulgent to her; she is likely to be as comfortably situated in all respects as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. They love her, and she loves them, and makes herself very useful to them. Benevolence sets out on her journey with a good heart, and puts a good face on it, but is apt to limp and grow feeble, unless she "I have seen your last very beautiful calls in the aid of self-interest, by way of in the Monthly Magazine: write thus, and crutch. In Mary's case, as far as respects you most generally have written thus, and those she is with, 'tis well that these prin- I shall never quarrel with you about simpliciples are so likely to co-operate. I am city. With regard to my lines

rather at a loss sometimes for books for her, -our reading is somewhat confined, and we have nearly exhausted our London library. She has her hands too full of work to read much, but a little she must read, for reading was her daily bread."

Two months, though passed by Lamb in anxiety and labour, but cheered by Miss Lamb's continued possession of reason, so far restored the tone of his mind, that his interest in the volume which had been contemplated to introduce his first verses to the world, in association with those of his friend, was enkindled anew. While cherishing the hope of reunion with his sister, and painfully wresting his leisure hours from poetry and Coleridge to amuse the dotage of his father, he watched over his own returning sense of enjoyment with a sort of holy jealousy, apprehensive lest he should forget too soon the terrible visitation of Heaven. At this time he thus writes:

"Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain.'*

'Laugh all that weep,' &c.

poem

I would willingly sacrifice them; but my portion of the volume is so ridiculously little, that, in honest truth, I can't spare them: as things are, I have very slight pretensions to participate in the title-page. White's book is at length reviewed in the Monthly; was it your doing, or Dyer's, to whom I sent him?—or, rather, do you not write in the Critical ?-for I observed, in an article of this month's, a line quoted out of that sonnet on Mrs. Siddons,

'With eager wondering, and perturb'd delight.' And a line from that sonnet would not readily have occurred to a stranger. That sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind the time

This epitaph, which, notwithstanding Lamb's gentle banter, occupied an entire page in the book, is curious-a miracle instead of wit "-for it is a common-place of Coleridge, who, investing ordinary things with a dreamy splendour, or weighing them down with accumulated thought, has rarely if ever written a stanza so smoothly vapid-so devoid of merit or offence-(unless

when you wrote those on Bowles, Priestly, play with me, you might as well not come Burke ;-'twas two Christmases ago, and in home at all.' The argument was unanswerthat nice little smoky room at the Salutation, able, and I set to afresh. I told you I do which is ever now continually presenting not approve of your omissions, neither do itself to my recollection, with all its asso-I quite coincide with you in your arrangeciated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-ments. I have not time to point out a better, rabbits, metaphysics, and poetry.-Are we and I suppose some self-associations of your never to meet again? How differently I am own have determined their place as they circumstanced now! I have never met with now stand. Your beginning, indeed, with any one-never shall meet with any one- the 'Joan of Arc' lines I coincide entirely who could or can compensate me for the loss with. I love a splendid outset—a magnificent of your society. I have no one to talk all portico,-and the diapason is grand. When these matters about to; I lack friends, II read the 'Religious Musings,' I think how lack books to supply their absence: but these poor, how unelevated, unoriginal, my blank complaints ill become me. Let me compare verse is 'Laugh all that weep,' especially, my present situation, prospects, and state of where the subject demanded a grandeur of mind, with what they were but two months conception; and I ask what business they back-but two months! O my friend, I am have among yours? but friendship covereth in danger of forgetting the awful lessons then a multitude of defects. I want some loppings presented to me! Remind me of them; made in the 'Chatterton;' it wants but a remind me of my duty! Talk seriously with little to make it rank among the finest me when you do write! I thank you, from irregular lyrics I ever read. Have you time my heart I thank you, for your solicitude and inclination to go to work upon it—or is about my sister. She is quite well, but must it too late-or do you think it needs none? not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good Don't reject those verses in one of your while. In the first place, because, at present, Watchmen, 'Dear native brook,' &c.; nor I it would hurt her, and hurt my father, for think those last lines you sent me, in which them to be together: secondly, from a regard 'all effortless' is without doubt to be preto the world's good report, for, I fear, tongues ferred to 'inactive.' If I am writing more will be busy whenever that event takes place. than ordinarily dully, 'tis that I am stupified Some have hinted, one man has pressed it with a tooth-ache. Hang it! do not omit on me, that she should be in perpetual con- 48, 52, and 53: what you do retain, though, finement: what she hath done to deserve, call sonnets, for heaven's sake, and not or the necessity of such an hardship, I see effusions. Spite of your ingenious anticipanot; do you? I am starving at the India tion of ridicule in your preface, the five last House, near seven o'clock without my lines of 50 are too good to be lost, the rest dinner, and so it has been, and will be, is not much worth. My tooth becomes almost all the week. I get home at night importunate-I must finish. Pray, pray, o'erwearied, quite faint, and then to cards write to me: if you knew with what an with my father, who will not let me enjoy anxiety of joy I open such a long packet as a meal in peace; but I must conform to my you last sent me, you would not grudge situation, and I hope I am, for the most part, giving a few minutes now and then to this intercourse (the only intercourse I fear we two shall ever have)-this conversation with your friend-such I boast to be called. God love you and yours! Write me when you move, lest I direct wrong. Has Sara no poems to publish? Those lines, 129, are probably too light for the volume where the Religious Musings' are, but I remember some very beautiful lines, addressed by somebody at Bristol to somebody in London. God bless you once more. Thursday-night. "C. LAMB."

not unthankful.

"I am got home at last, and, after repeated games at cribbage, have got my father's leave to write awhile; with difficulty got it, for when I expostulated about playing any more, he very aptly replied, 'If you won't

it be an offence to make fade do duty as a verb active)

as the following:

"Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;
The opening bud to Heaven convey'd,
And bade it blossom there."

In another letter, about this time (De- brotherly feeling that we ever met, even as cember, 1796), Lamb transmitted to Coleridge two Poems for the volume-one a copy of verses "To a Young Lady going out to India," which were not inserted, and are not worthy of preservation; the other, entitled, "The Tomb of Douglas," which was inserted, and which he chiefly valued as a memorial of his impression of Mrs. Siddons' acting in Lady Randolph. The following passage closes the sheet.

"At length I have done with versemaking; not that I relish other people's poetry less; their's comes from 'em without effort, mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have been reading 'The Task' with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper: I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat of Cowper.' Write to me. God love you and yours. C. L."

The following, of 10th December, 1796, illustrates Lamb's almost wayward admiration of his only friend, and a feeling-how temporary with him!-of vexation with the imperfect sympathies of his elder brother.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns, but it was at a time when in my highly agitated and perhaps distorted state of mind, I thought it a duty to read 'em hastily and burn 'em. I burned all my own verses; all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a thousand sources: I burned a little journal of my foolish passion which I had a long time kept

'Noting ere they past away

The little lines of yesterday.'

I almost burned all your letters,-I did as bad, I lent 'em to a friend to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition

into our papers, for much as he dwelt upon your conversation, while you were among us, and delighted to be with you, it has been his fashion ever since to depreciate and cry you down,-you were the cause of my madnessyou and your damned foolish sensibility and

the sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus, is said to have 'cursed wit and Poetry and Pope.' I quote wrong, but no matter. These letters I lent to a friend to be out of the way, for a season, but I have claimed them in vain, and shall not cease to regret their loss. Your packets, posterior to the date of my misfortunes, commencing with that valuable consolatory epistle, are every day accumulating— they are sacred things with me."

The following long letter, bearing date on the outside, 5th January, 1797, is addressed to Mr. Coleridge at Stowey, near Bridgewater, whither he had removed from Bristol, to enjoy the society and protection of his friend Mr. Poole. The original is a curious specimen of clear compressed penmanship; being contained in three sides of a sheet of foolscap.

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"Sunday morning.-You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a potgirl. You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most splendid ornament of Southey's poem all this cock-and-a-bull story of Joan, the publican's daughter of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode of a waggoner, his wife, and six children. The texture will be most lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these addenda are, no doubt, in their way, admirable, too; but many would prefer the Joan of Southey.

'On mightiest deeds to brood

Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart
Throb fast; anon I paused, and in a state
Of half expectance listened to the wind;'
They wondered at me, who had known me once
A cheerful careless damsel ;'

The eye,

That of the circling throng and of the visible world

Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy;'

I see nothing in your description of the Maid
equal to these. There is a fine originality
certainly in those lines—

For she had lived in this bad world
As in a place of tombs,

And touched not the pollutions of the dead; '

melancholy-and he lamented with a true but your 'fierce vivacity' is a faint copy of

1

"In your notice of Southey's new volume you omit to mention the most pleasing of all, the 'Miniature'

There were

Who formed high hopes and flattering ones of thee,
Young Robert!'

'Spirit of Spenser !-was the wanderer wrong?'

"Fairfax I have been in quest of a long time. Johnson, in his 'Life of Waller,' gives a most delicious specimen of him, and adds, in the true manner of that delicate critic, as well as amiable man, 'It may be presumed that this old version will not be much read after the elegant translation of my friend, Mr. Hoole.' I endeavoured-I wished to

the 'fierce and terrible benevolence' of the wounds I may have been inflicting on Southey; added to this, that it will look like my poor friend's vanity. rivalship in you, and extort a comparison with Southey, I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, considered in themselves as an addition to what you had before written, (strains of a far higher mood,) are but such as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods, at such times as she has met Noll Goldsmith, and walked and talked with him, calling him 'old acquaintance.' Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with you in the sublime of poetry; but he tells a plain tale better than you. I will enumerate some woful blemishes, some of 'em sad deviations from that simplicity which was your aim. 'Hailed who might be near' (the 'canvascoverture moving,' by the by, is laughable); 'a woman and six children' (by the way, why not nine children? It would have been just half as pathetic again): 'statues of sleep they seemed': 'frost-mangled wretch: green putridity': 'hailed him immortal' (rather ludicrous again): 'voiced a sad and simple tale' (abominable !): 'improvendered': 'such his tale': 'Ah! suffering to the height of what was suffered' (a most insufferable is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. line): 'amazements of affright': 'the hot The remainder is so so. The best line, I sore brain attributes its own hues of ghastli- think, is, 'He belong'd, I believe, to the witch ness and torture' (what shocking confusion Melancholy.' By the way, when will our of ideas)!

6

"In these delineations of common and natural feelings, in the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Roubigné's tenants, 'much of his native loftiness remained in the execution. "I was reading your 'Religious Musings' the other day, and sincerely I think it the | noblest poem in the language, next after the 'Paradise Lost,' and even that was not made the vehicle of such grand truths. There is one mind,' &c., down to Almighty's throne,' are without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading.

6

'Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze,
Views all creation.'

I wish I could have written those lines. I rejoice that I am able to relish them. The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There you have no compeer in modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in possession of such men as Cowper and Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam into

gain some idea of Tasso from this Mr. Hoole, the great boast and ornament of the India House, but soon desisted. I found him more vapid than smallest small beer 'sunvinegared.' Your 'Dream,' down to that exquisite line—

'I can't tell half his adventures,'

volume come out? Don't delay it till you have written a new Joan of Arc. Send what letters you please by me, and in any way you choose, single or double. The India Company is better adapted to answer the cost than the generality of my friend's correspondents-such poor and honest dogs as John Thelwall, particularly. I cannot say I know Colson, at least intimately; I once supped with him and Allen; I think his manners very pleasing. I will not tell you what I think of Lloyd, for he may by chance come to see this letter, and that thought puts a restraint on me. I cannot think what subject would suit your epic genius; some philosophical subject, I conjecture, in which shall be blended the sublime of poetry and of science. Your proposed 'Hymns' will be a fit preparatory study wherewith 'to discipline your young noviciate soul.' I grow dull; I'll go walk myself out of my dulness.

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