17. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[Little Queen Street, Night of Dec. 9th,] 1796.
I am sorry I cannot now relish your poetical present as thoroughly as I feel it deserves; but I do not the less thank Lloyd and you for it.
In truth, Coleridge, I am perplexed, & at times almost cast down. I am beset with perplexities. The old hag of a wealthy relation, who took my aunt off our hands in the beginning of trouble, has found out that she is "indolent and mulish"--I quote her own words--and that her attachment to us is so strong that she can never be happy apart. The Lady, with delicate Irony, remarks that, if I am not an Hypocrite, I shall rejoyce to receive her again; and that it will be a means of making me more fond of home to have so dear a friend to come home to! The fact is, she is jealous of my aunt's bestowing any kind recollections on us, while she enjoys the patronage of her roof. She says she finds it inconsistent with her own "ease and tranquility" to keep her any longer, & in fine summons me to fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoyce to transplant the poor old creature from the chilling air of such patronage, yet I know how straitend we are already, how unable already to answer any demand which sickness or any extraordinary expence may make. I know this, and all unused as I am to struggle with perplexities I am somewhat nonplusd, to say no worse. This prevents me from a thorough relish of what Lloyd's kindness and yours have furnished me with. I thank you tho from my heart, and feel myself not quite alone in the earth.
Before I offer, what alone I have to offer, a few obvious remarks on the poems you sent me, I can[not] but notice the odd coincidence of two young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers. Love--what L[loyd] calls "the feverish and romantic tye"--hath too long domineerd over all the charities of home: the dear domestic tyes of father, brother, husband. The amiable and benevolent Cowper has a beautiful passage in his "Task,"--some natural and painful reflections on his deceased parents: and Hayley's sweet lines to his mother are notoriously the best things he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them, are--
"How gladly would the man recall to life The boy's neglected sire; a mother, too. That softer name, perhaps more gladly still, Might he demand them at the gates of death."
I cannot but smile to see my Granny so gayly deck'd forth: tho', I think, whoever altered "thy" praises to "her" praises, "thy" honoured memory to "her" honoured memory, did wrong--they best exprest my feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment, and, breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the 1st to the 3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st person, just as the random fancy or the feeling directs. Among Lloyd's sonnets, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th, are eminently beautiful. I think him too lavish of his expletives; the do's and did's, when they occur too often, bring a quaintness with them along with their simplicity, or rather air of antiquity which the patrons of them seem desirous of conveying.
The lines on Friday are very pleasing--"Yet calls itself in pride of Infancy woman or man," &c., "affection's tottering troop"--are prominent beauties. Another time, when my mind were more at ease, I could be more particular in my remarks, and I would postpone them now, only I want some diversion of mind. The Melancholy Man is a charming piece of poetry, only the "whys" (with submission) are too many. Yet the questions are too good to be any of 'em omitted. For those lines of yours, page 18, omitted in magazine, I think the 3 first better retain'd--the 3 last, which are somewhat simple in the most affronting sense of the word, better omitted: to this my taste directs me--I have no claim to prescribe to you. "Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies" is an exquisite line, but you knew that when you wrote 'em, and I trifle in pointing such out. Tis altogether the sweetest thing to me you ever wrote--tis all honey. "No wish profaned my overwhelmed heart, Blest hour, it was a Luxury to be"--I recognise feelings, which I may taste again, if tranquility has not taken his flight for ever, and I will not believe but I shall be happy, very happy again. The next poem to your friend is very beautiful: need I instance the pretty fancy of "the rock's collected tears"--or that original line "pour'd all its healthful greenness on the soul"?--let it be, since you asked me, "as neighbouring fountains each reflect the whole"--tho' that is somewhat harsh; indeed the ending is not so finish'd as the rest, which if you omit in your forthcoming edition, you will do the volume wrong, and the very binding will cry out. Neither shall you omit the 2 following poems. "The hour when we shall meet again," is fine fancy, tis true, but fancy catering in the Service of the feeling--fetching from her stores most splendid banquets to satisfy her. Do not, do not omit it. Your sonnet to the River Otter excludes those equally beautiful lines, which deserve not to be lost, "as the tired savage," &c., and I prefer that copy in your Watchman. I plead for its preference.
Another time, I may notice more particularly Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets. I shrink from them now: my teazing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things, too selfish for sympathy; and these ill-digested, meaningless remarks I have imposed on myself as a task, to lull reflection, as well as to show you I did not neglect reading your valuable present. Return my acknowledgments to Lloyd; you two appear to be about realising an Elysium upon earth, and, no doubt, I shall be happier. Take my best wishes. Remember me most affectionately to Mrs. C., and give little David Hartley--God bless its little heart!--a kiss for me. Bring him up to know the meaning of his Christian name, and what that name (imposed upon him) will demand of him.
C. LAMB.
God love you!
I write, for one thing, to say that I shall write no more till you send me word where you are, for you are so soon to move.
My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you: continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is not "all barrenness."
[The poetical present, as the late Mr. Dykes Campbell pointed out in The Atheneum, June 13, 1891, consisted of Lloyd's Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, to which Lamb had contributed "The Grandame," and of a little privately-printed collection of poems by Coleridge and Lloyd, which they had intended to publish, but did not. The pamphlet has completely vanished. In addition to these two works the poetical present also comprised another privately-printed collection, a little pamphlet of twenty-eight sonnets which Coleridge had arranged for the purpose of binding up with those of Bowles. It included three of Bowles', four of Coleridge's, four of Lamb's, four of Southey's, and the remainder by Dermody, Lloyd, Charlotte Smith, and others. A copy of this pamphlet is preserved in the South Kensington Museum.
"The poems you sent me." This would be Lloyd's Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer. When Lamb reprinted "The Grandame" in Coleridge's second edition, 1797, he put back the original text.
I now take up Mr. Dykes Campbell's comments on the letter, where it branches off from the Priscilla Farmer volume to the vanished pamphlet of poems by Coleridge and Lloyd:--
Beginning with Lloyd's "Melancholy Man" (first printed in the Carlisle volume of 1795), he [Lamb] passes to Coleridge's poem on leaving the honeymoon-cottage at Clevedon, "altogether the sweetest thing to me," says Lamb, "you ever wrote." The verses had appeared in the Monthly Magazine two months before.... That Lamb's counsel was followed to some extent may be gathered from a comparison between the text of the magazine and that of 1797:--
"Once I saw (Hallowing his sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen: he paus'd, and look'd, With a pleas'd sadness, and gazed all around, Then ey'd our Cottage, and gaz'd round again, And said, it was a blessed little place! And we were blessed!" Monthly Magazine.
"Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen. Methought it calm'd His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings: for he paus'd, and look'd With a pleas'd sadness, and gaz'd all around, Then ey'd our cottage, and gaz'd round again, And sigh'd and said, it was a blessed place. And we were blessed." Poems, 1797.
It will be observed that Coleridge in 1797 inserted some lines which were not in the magazine. They were probably restored from a MS. copy Lamb had previously seen, and if Coleridge did not cancel all that Lamb wisely counselled, he certainly drew the sting of the "affronting simplicity" by removing the word "little." The comical ambiguity of the Bristol man's exclamation as first reported could hardly have failed to drive Lamb's dull care away for a moment or two.
[In] "the next poem to your friend," ... [Lamb is] speaking of Coleridge's lines "To Charles Lloyd"--those beginning
"A mount, not wearisome and bare and steep."
In the "forthcoming edition" the poet improved a little the barely tolerated line, making it read,--
"As neighb'ring fountains image, each the whole,"
but did not take Lamb's hint to omit the five which closed the poem. Lamb, however, got his way--perhaps took it--when the verses were reprinted in 1803, in the volume he saw through the press for Coleridge.
"Neither shall you omit the 2 following poems. 'The hour when we shall meet again' is [only?] a fine fancy, 'tis true, but fancy catering in the service of the feeling--fetching from her stores most splendid banquets to satisfy her. Do not, do not, omit it."
So wrote Lamb of these somewhat slender verses, but his friend had composed them "during illness and in absence," and Lamb in his own heart-sickness and loneliness detected the reality which underlay the conventionality of expression. The critic slept, and even when he was awake again in 1803 was fain to let the lines be reprinted with only the concession of their worst couplet:--
"While finely-flushing float her kisses meek, Like melted rubies, o'er my pallid cheek."
The second of the "2 following poems" was Coleridge's "Sonnet to the River Otter." The version then before him "excludes," complains Lamb, "those equally beautiful lines which deserve not to be lost, 'as the tir'd savage,' &c., and I prefer the copy in your Watchman. I plead for its preference." This pleading ... was not responded to in the way Lamb wanted, but in the appendix to the 1797 volume Coleridge printed the whole of the poem on an "Autumnal Evening," to which the "tir'd savage" properly belonged....
"Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets." Lamb here refers to the third portion of the poetical present--the twenty-eight sonnets to be bound up with those of Bowles. Thomas Dermody (1775-1802) was an Irish poet of squalidly dissolute life. A collection of his verses appeared in 1792.]
18. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
Dec. 10th, 1796.
I had put my letter into the post rather hastily, not expecting to have to acknowledge another from you so soon. This morning's present has made me alive again: my last night's epistle was childishly querulous; but you have put a little life into me, and I will thank you for your remembrance of me, while my sense of it is yet warm; for if I linger a day or two I may use the same phrase of acknowledgment, or similar; but the feeling that dictates it now will be gone. I shall send you a caput mortuum, not a cor vivens. Thy Watchman's, thy bellman's, verses, I do retort upon thee, thou libellous varlet,--why, you cried the hours yourself, and who made you so proud? But I submit, to show my humility, most implicitly to your dogmas. I reject entirely the copy of verses you reject. With regard to my leaving off versifying, you have said so many pretty things, so many fine compliments, ingeniously decked out in the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a present feeling somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most un-muse-ical soul,--did you not (now for a Rowland compliment for your profusion of Olivers)--did you not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies and profusion of heart displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from attempting anything after you. At present I have not leisure to make verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. In the ignorant present time, who can answer for the future man? "At lovers' perjuries Jove laughs"--and poets have sometimes a disingenuous way of forswearing their occupation. This though is not my case. The tender cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding recollections, is favourable to the Sonnet or the Elegy; but from
"The sainted growing woof, The teasing troubles keep aloof."
The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate teasing cares of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that music.
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 madness--you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy--and he lamented with a true brotherly feeling that we ever met, even as 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.
Publish your Burns when and how you like, it will be new to me,--my memory of it is very confused, and tainted with unpleasant associations. Burns was the god of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours. I am jealous of your fraternising with Bowles, when I think you relish him more than Burns or my old favourite, Cowper. But you conciliate matters when you talk of the "divine chit-chat" of the latter: by the expression I see you thoroughly relish him. I love Mrs. Coleridge for her excuses an hundredfold more dearly than if she heaped "line upon line," out-Hannah-ing Hannah More, and had rather hear you sing "Did a very little baby" by your family fire-side, than listen to you when you were repeating one of Bowles's sweetest sonnets in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fireside at the Salutation. Yet have I no higher ideas of heaven. Your company was one "cordial in this melancholy vale"--the remembrance of it is a blessing partly, and partly a curse.
When I can abstract myself from things present, I can enjoy it with a freshness of relish; but it more constantly operates to an unfavourable comparison with the uninteresting; converse I always and only can partake in. Not a soul loves Bowles here; scarce one has heard of Burns; few but laugh at me for reading my Testament--they talk a language I understand not: I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by letter and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge from the self-same sources, our communication with the scenes of the world alike narrow: never having kept separate company, or any "company" "together"--never having read separate books, and few books together--what knowledge have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and connexions, how few sentiments can take place, without friends, with few books, with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit! We need some support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely, and be not sparing of your advice. Continue to remember us, and to show us you do remember us: we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and yours. All I can add to your happiness, will be sympathy. You can add to mine more; you can teach me wisdom. I am indeed an unreasonable correspondent; but I was unwilling to let my last night's letter go off without this qualifier: you will perceive by this my mind is easier, and you will rejoice. I do not expect or wish you to write, till you are moved; and of course shall not, till you announce to me that event, think of writing myself. Love to Mrs. Coleridge and David Hartley, and my kind remembrance to Lloyd, if he is with you.
C. LAMB.
I will get "Nature and Art,"--have not seen it yet--nor any of Jeremy Taylor's works.
[The reference to the bellman's verses (the bellman, or watchman, used to leave verses at the houses on his beat at Easter as a reminder of his deserts) is not quite clear. Lamb evidently had submitted for the new volume some lines which Coleridge would not pass--possibly the poem in Letter No. 16.
Coleridge some time before had sent to Lamb the very sweet lines relative to Burns, under the title, "To a Friend who had Declared His Intention of Writing no more Poetry."
"Did a very little baby." In the Appendix to Vol. I. of the 1847 edition of the Biog. Lit., Sara Coleridge writes, concerning children and domestic evenings, "'Did a very little babby make a very great noise?' is the first line of a nursery song, in which Mr. Coleridge recorded some of his experience on this recondite subject." The song has disappeared.
Nature and Art was Mrs. Inchbald's story, published in 1796. Lamb later became an enthusiast for Jeremy Taylor.]
19. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[Dated outside: Jan. 2, 1797.]
Your success in the higher species of the Ode is such, as bespeaks you born for atchievements of loftier enterprize than to linger in the lowly train of songsters and sonneteurs. Sincerely I think your Ode one of the finest I have read. The opening is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the "skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving on the wind" is one of those noble Hints at which the Reader's imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions. Do the words "impetuous" and "solemnize" harmonize well in the same line? Think and judge. In the 2d strophe, there seems to be too much play of fancy to be consistent with that continued elevation we are taught to expect from the strain of the foregoing. The parenthized line (by the way I abominate parentheses in this kind of poetry) at the beginning of 7th page, and indeed all that gradual description of the throes and pangs of nature in childbirth, I do not much like, and those 4 first lines,--I mean "tomb gloom anguish and languish"--rise not above mediocrity. In the Epode, your mighty genius comes again: "I marked ambition" &c. Thro' the whole Epod indeed you carry along our souls in a full spring tide of feeling and imaginat'n. Here is the "Storm of Music," as Cowper expresses it. Would it not be more abrupt "Why does the northern Conqueress stay" or "where does the northern Conqueress stay"?--this change of measure, rather than the feebler "Ah! whither", "Foul her life and dark her tomb, mighty army of the dead, dance like deathflies" &c.: here is genius, here is poetry, rapid, irresistible. The concluding line, is it not a personif: without use? "Nec deus intersit"--except indeed for rhyme sake. Would the laws of Strophe and antistrophe, which, if they are as unchangeable, I suppose are about as wise, [as] the Mede and Persian laws, admit of expunging that line altogether, and changing the preceding one to "and he, poor madman, deemd it quenchd in endless night?"--fond madman or proud madman if you will, but poor is more contemptuous. If I offer alterations of my own to your poetry, and admit not yours in mine, it is upon the principle of a present to a rich man being graciously accepted, and the same present to a poor man being considered as in insult. To return--The Antistrophe that follows is not inferior in grandeur or original: but is I think not faultless--e: g: How is Memory alone, when all the etherial multitude are there? Reflect. Again "storiedst thy sad hours" is harsh, I need not tell you, but you have gained your point in expressing much meaning in few words: "Purple locks and snow white glories" "mild Arcadians ever blooming" "seas of milk and ships of amber" these are things the Muse talks about when, to borrow H. Walpole's witty phrase, she is not finely-phrenzied, only a little light-headed, that's all. "Purple locks." They may manage things differently in fairy land, but your "golden tresses" are more to my fancy. The spirit of the Earth is a most happy conceit, and the last line is one of the luckiest I ever heard--"and stood up beautiful before the cloudy seat." I cannot enough admire it. 'Tis somehow picturesque in the very sound. The 2d Antistrophe (what is the meaning of these things?) is fine and faultless (or to vary the alliteration and not diminish the affectation) beautiful and blameless. I only except to the last line as meaningless after the preceding, and useless entirely--besides, why disjoin "nature and the world" here, when you had confounded both in their pregnancy: "the common earth and nature," recollect, a little before--And there is a dismal superfluity in the unmeaning vocable "unhurld"--the worse, as it is so evidently a rhyme-fetch.--"Death like he dozes" is a prosaic conceit--indeed all the Epode as far as "brother's corse" I most heartily commend to annihilation. The enthusiast of the lyre should not be so feebly, so tediously, delineative of his own feelings; 'tis not the way to become "Master of our affections." The address to Albion is very agreeable, and concludes even beautifully: "speaks safety to his island child"--"Sworded"--epithet I would change for "cruel."
The immediately succeeding lines are prosaic: "mad avarice" is an unhappy combination; and "the coward distance yet with kindling pride" is not only reprehensible for the antithetical turn, but as it is a quotation: "safe distance" and "coward distance" you have more than once had recourse to before--And the Lyric Muse, in her enthusiasm, should talk the language of her country, something removed from common use, something "recent," unborrowed. The dreams of destruction "soothing her fierce solitude," are vastly grand and terrific: still you weaken the effect by that superfluous and easily-conceived parenthesis that finishes the page. The foregoing image, few minds could have conceived, few tongues could have so cloath'd; "muttring destempered triumph" &c. is vastly fine. I hate imperfect beginnings and endings. Now your concluding stanza is worthy of so fine an ode. The beginning was awakening and striking; the ending is soothing and solemn--Are you serious when you ask whether you shall admit this ode? it would be strange infatuation to leave out your Chatterton; mere insanity to reject this. Unless you are fearful that the splendid thing may be a means of "eclipsing many a softer satellite" that twinkles thro' the volume. Neither omit the annex'd little poem. For my part, detesting alliterations, I should make the 1st line "Away, with this fantastic pride of woe." Well may you relish Bowles's allegory. I need only tell you, I have read, and will only add, that I dislike ambition's name gilded on his helmet-cap, and that I think, among the more striking personages you notice, you omitted the most striking, Remorse! "He saw the trees--the sun--then hied him to his cave again"!!! The 2d stanza of mania is superfl: the 1st was never exceeded. The 2d is too methodic: for her. With all its load of beauties, I am more affected with the 6 first stanzas of the Elegiac poem written during sickness. Tell me your feelings. If the fraternal sentiment conveyed in the following lines will atone for the total want of anything like merit or genius in it, I desire you will print it next after my other sonnet to my sister.
Friend of my earliest years, & childish days, My joys, my sorrows, thou with me hast shared Companion dear; & we alike have fared Poor pilgrims we, thro' life's unequal ways It were unwisely done, should we refuse To cheer our path, as featly as we may, Our lonely path to cheer, as travellers use With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay. And we will sometimes talk past troubles o'er, Of mercies shewn, & all our sickness heal'd, And in his judgments God remembring love; And we will learn to praise God evermore For those "Glad tidings of great joy" reveal'd By that sooth messenger, sent from above.
1797.
If you think the epithet "sooth" quaint, substitute "blest messenger." I hope you are printing my sonnets, as I directed you--particularly the 2d. "Methinks" &c. with my last added 6 lines at ye end: and all of 'em as I last made 'em.
This has been a sad long letter of business, with no room in it for what honest Bunyan terms heart-work. I have just room left to congratulate you on your removal to Stowey; to wish success to all your projects; to "bid fair peace" be to that house; to send my love and best wishes, breathed warmly, after your dear Sara, and her little David Hartley. If Lloyd be with you, bid him write to me: I feel to whom I am obliged primarily for two very friendly letters I have received already from him. A dainty sweet book that "Art and Nature" is. I am at present re-re-reading Priestley's examinat of the Scotch Drs: how the Rogue strings 'em up! three together! You have no doubt read that clear, strong, humorous, most entertaining piece of reasoning. If not, procure it, and be exquisitely amused. I wish I could get more of Priestley's works. Can you recommend me to any more books, easy of access, such as circulating shops afford? God bless you and yours.
Poor Mary is very unwell with a sore throat and a slight species of scarlet fever. God bless her too.
Monday Morning, at Office.
[Coleridge had just published in quarto his Ode on the Departing Year. In order that Lamb's letter may be intelligible it is necessary, I think, to give the text of this edition in full. It will be found in the Appendix to this volume. Lamb returns to his criticism in the next letter.
The "annexed little poem" was that "Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune," which began, and still begins, "Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe."
Bowies' allegory was the poem, "Hope, An Allegorical Sketch," recently published.
The poem was not included in the 1797 volume, but was printed in the Monthly Magazine, October, 1797. Coleridge had moved to his cottage at Nether Stowey on the last day of 1796.
Priestley's book would be An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Dr. Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr. Oswald's Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion, 1774.]
20. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[P.M. Jan. 10, 1797.]
Saturday.
I am completely reconciled to that second strophe, and wa[i]ve all objection. In spite of the Grecian Lyrists, I persist on [in] thinking your brief personification of Madness useless; reverence forbids me to say, impertinent. Golden locks and snow white glories are as incongruous as your former, and if the great Italian painters, of whom my friend knows about as much as the man in the moon, if these great gentlemen be on your side, I see no harm in retaining the purple--the glories that I have observed to encircle the heads of saints and madonnas in those old paintings have been mostly of a dirty drab-color'd yellow--a dull gambogium. Keep your old line: it will excite a confused kind of pleasurable idea in the reader's mind, not clear enough to be called a conception, nor just enough, I think, to reduce to painting. It is a rich line, you say, and riches hide a many faults. I maintain, that in the 2d antist: you do disjoin Nature and the world, and contrary to your conduct in the 2d strophe. "Nature joins her groans"--joins with whom, a God's name, but the world or earth in line preceding? But this is being over curious, I acknowledge. Nor did I call the last line useless, I only objected to "unhurld." I cannot be made to like the former part of that 2d Epode; I cannot be made to feel it, as I do the parallel places in Isaiah, Jeremy and Daniel. Whether it is that in the present case the rhyme impairs the efficacy; or that the circumstances are feigned, and we are conscious of a made up lye in the case, and the narrative is too long winded to preserve the semblance of truth; or that lines 8. 9. 10. 14 in partic: 17 and 18 are mean and unenthusiastic; or that lines 5 to 8 in their change of rhyme shew like art--I don't know, but it strikes me as something meant to affect, and failing in its purpose. Remember my waywardness of feeling is single, and singly stands opposed to all your friends, and what is one among many! This I know, that your quotations from the prophets have never escaped me, and never fail'd to affect me strongly. I hate that simile. I am glad you have amended that parenthesis in the account of Destruction. I like it well now. Only utter [? omit] that history of child-bearing, and all will do well. Let the obnoxious Epode remain, to terrify such of your friends as are willing to be terrified. I think I would omit the Notes, not as not good per se, but as uncongenial with the dignity of the Ode. I need not repeat my wishes to have my little sonnets printed verbatim my last way. In particular, I fear lest you should prefer printing my first sonnet, as you have done more than once, "did the wand of Merlin wave"? It looks so like Mr. Merlin, the ingenious successor of the immortal Merlin, now living in good health and spirits, and nourishing in magical reputation in Oxford Street; and on my life, one half who read it would understand it so. Do put 'em forth finally as I have, in various letters, settled it; for first a man's self is to be pleased, and then his friends,--and, of course the greater number of his friends, if they differ inter se. Thus taste may safely be put to the vote. I do long to see our names together--not for vanity's sake, and naughty pride of heart altogether, for not a living soul, I know or am intimate with, will scarce read the book--so I shall gain nothing quoad famam,--and yet there is a little vanity mixes in it, I cannot help denying. I am aware of the unpoetical cast of the 6 last lines of my last sonnet, and think myself unwarranted in smuggling so tame a thing into the book; only the sentiments of those 6 lines are thoroughly congenial to me in my state of mind, and I wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary; that it has no originality in its cast, nor anything in the feelings, but what is common and natural to thousands, nor aught properly called poetry, I see; still it will tend to keep present to my mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These 6 lines, too, have not, to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it, if you like.--What a treasure it is to my poor indolent and unemployed mind, thus to lay hold on a subject to talk about, tho' 'tis but a sonnet and that of the lowest order. How mournfully inactive I am!--'Tis night: good-night.
My sister, I thank God, is nigh recovered. She was seriously ill. Do, in your next letter, and that right soon, give me some satisfaction respecting your present situation at Stowey. Is it a farm you have got? and what does your worship know about farming? Coleridge, I want you to write an Epic poem. Nothing short of it can satisfy the vast capacity of true poetic genius. Having one great End to direct all your poetical faculties to, and on which to lay out your hopes, your ambition, will shew you to what you are equal. By the sacred energies of Milton, by the dainty sweet and soothing phantasies of honeytongued Spenser, I adjure you to attempt the Epic. Or do something more ample than writing an occasional brief ode or sonnet; something "to make yourself for ever known,--to make the age to come your own". But I prate; doubtless you meditate something. When you are exalted among the Lords of Epic fame, I shall recall with pleasure, and exultingly, the days of your humility, when you disdained not to put forth in the same volume with mine, your religious musings, and that other poem from the Joan of Arc, those promising first fruits of high renown to come. You have learning, you have fancy, you have enthusiasm--you have strength and amplitude of wing enow for flights like those I recommend. In the vast and unexplored regions of fairyland, there is ground enough unfound and uncultivated; search there, and realize your favourite Susquehanah scheme. In all our comparisons of taste, I do not know whether I have ever heard your opinion of a poet, very dear to me, the now out of fashion Cowley--favor me with your judgment of him, and tell me if his prose essays, in particular, as well as no inconsiderable part of his verse, be not delicious. I prefer the graceful rambling of his essays, even to the courtly elegance and ease of Addison--abstracting from this the latter's exquisite humour. Why is not your poem on Burns in the Monthly Magazine? I was much disappointed. I have a pleasurable but confused remembrance of it.
When the little volume is printed, send me 3 or 4, at all events not more than 6 copies, and tell me if I put you to any additional expence, by printing with you. I have no thought of the kind, and in that case, must reimburse you. My epistle is a model of unconnectedness, but I have no partic: subject to write on, and must proportion my scribble in some degree to the increase of postage. It is not quite fair, considering how burdensome your correspondence from different quarters must be, to add to it with so little shew of reason. I will make an end for this evening. Sunday Even:--Farewell.
Priestly, whom I sin in almost adoring, speaks of "such a choice of company, as tends to keep up that right bent, and firmness of mind, which a necessary intercourse with the world would otherwise warp and relax. Such fellowship is the true balsam of life, its cement is infinitely more durable than that of the friendships of the world, and it looks for its proper fruit, and complete gratification, to the life beyond the Grave." Is there a possible chance for such an one as me to realize in this world, such friendships? Where am I to look for 'em? What testimonials shall I bring of my being worthy of such friendship? Alas! the great and good go together in separate Herds, and leave such as me to lag far far behind in all intellectual, and far more grievous to say, in all moral, accomplishments. Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance: not one Christian: not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly what am I to do? Wesley (have you read his life? was he not an elevated character?) Wesley has said, "Religion is not a solitary thing." Alas! it necessarily is so with me, or next to solitary. 'Tis true, you write to me. But correspondence by letter, and personal intimacy, are very widely different. Do, do write to me, and do some good to my mind, already how much "warped and relaxed" by the world!--'Tis the conclusion of another evening. Good night. God have us all in his keeping. If you are sufficiently at leisure, oblige me with an account of your plan of life at Stowey--your literary occupations and prospects--in short make me acquainted with every circumstance, which, as relating to you, can be interesting to me. Are you yet a Berkleyan? Make me one. I rejoice in being, speculatively, a necessarian. Would to God, I were habitually a practical one. Confirm me in the faith of that great and glorious doctrine, and keep me steady in the contemplation of it. You sometime since exprest an intention you had of finishing some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied with the beings around me,--but I cannot help occasionally exclaiming "Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Meshech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar"--I know I am no ways better in practice than my neighbours--but I have a taste for religion, an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not. I gain nothing by being with such as myself--we encourage one another in mediocrity--I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. All this must sound odd to you; but these are my predominant feelings, when I sit down to write to you, and I should put force upon my mind, were I to reject them. Yet I rejoyce, and feel my privilege with gratitude, when I have been reading some wise book, such as I have just been reading--Priestley on Philosophical necessity--in the thought that I enjoy a kind of communion, a kind of friendship even, with the great and good. Books are to me instead of friends. I wish they did not resemble the latter in their scarceness.--And how does little David Hartley? "Ecquid in antiquam virtutem?"--does his mighty name work wonders yet upon his little frame, and opening mind? I did not distinctly understand you,--you don't mean to make an actual ploughman of him? Mrs. C---- is no doubt well,--give my kindest respects to her. Is Lloyd with you yet?--are you intimate with Southey? What poems is he about to publish--he hath a most prolific brain, and is indeed a most sweet poet. But how can you answer all the various mass of interrogation I have put to you in the course of this sheet. Write back just what you like, only write something, however brief. I have now nigh finished my page, and got to the end of another evening (Monday evening)--and my eyes are heavy and sleepy, and my brain unsuggestive. I have just heart enough awake to say Good night once more, and God love you my dear friend, God love us all. Mary bears an affectionate remembrance of you.
CHARLES LAMB.
[The criticisms contained in the first paragraph bear upon Coleridge's "Ode on the Departing Year," which had already appeared twice, in the Cambridge Intelligencer and in a quarto issued by Cottle, and was now being revised for the second edition of the Poems.
The personification of Madness was contained in the line, afterwards omitted:--
For still does Madness roam on Guilt's black dizzy height.
Lamb's objection to this line, considering his home circumstances at the time, was very natural. In Antistrophe I. Coleridge originally said of the ethereal multitude in Heaven--
Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.
In the 1797 Poems the line ran--
Whose wreathed Locks with snow-white Glories shone;
and in the final version--
Whose locks with wreaths, whose wreaths with glories shone.
Coleridge must have supported his case, in the letter which Lamb is answering, by a reference to the Italian painters.
Coleridge in the 1797 edition of his Poems made no alteration to meet Lamb's strictures. The simile that Lamb hated is, I imagine, that of the soldier on the war field. "The history of child-bearing" referred to is the passage at the end of Strophe II. To the quarto Coleridge had appended various notes. In 1797 he had only three, and added an argument.
The reference to Merlin will be explained by a glance at the parallel sonnets above. Merlin was entirely Coleridge's idea. A conjuror of that name was just then among London's attractions.
The "last sonnet," which was not the last in the 1797 volume, but the 6th, was that beginning "If from my lips" (see first letter).
In connection with Lamb's question on the Stowey husbandry, the following quotation from a letter from Coleridge to the Rev. J. P. Estlin, belonging to this period, is interesting;--
Our house is better than we expected--there is a comfortable bedroom and sitting-room for C. Lloyd, and another for us, a room for Nanny, a kitchen, and out-house. Before our door a clear brook runs of very soft water; and in the back yard is a nice well of fine spring water. We have a very pretty garden, and large enough to find us vegetables and employment, and I am already an expert gardener, and both my hands can exhibit a callum as testimonials of their industry. We have likewise a sweet orchard.
Writing a little before this to Charles Lloyd, senior, Coleridge had said: "My days I shall devote to the acquirement of practical husbandry and horticulture."
The poem on Burns was that "To a Friend [Lamb] who had Declared His Intention of Writing no more Poetry." It was printed first in a Bristol paper and then in the Annual Anthology, 1800.
Priestley's remark is in the Dedication to John Lee, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, of "A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley," etc., included in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Vol. III., 1778. The discussion arose from the publication by Priestley of The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, which itself is an appendage to Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit.
Three lives at least of John Wesley were published in the two years following his death in 1791. Coleridge later studied Wesley closely, for he added valuable notes to Southey's life (see the 1846 edition).
"A Berkleyan," i.e., a follower of Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), who in his New Theory of Vision and later works maintained that "what we call matter has no actual existence, and that the impressions which we believe ourselves to receive from it are not, in fact, derived from anything external to ourselves, but are produced within us by a certain disposition of the mind, the immediate operation of God" (Benham's Dictionary of Religion).
Coleridge when sending Southey one version of his poem to Charles Lamb, entitled "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" (to which we shall come later), in July, 1797, appended to the following passage the note, "You remember I am a Berkleian":--
Struck with joy's deepest calm, and gazing round On the wide view, may gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; a living thing That acts upon the mind, and with such hues As clothe the Almighty Spirit, when He makes Spirits perceive His presence!
"A Necessarian." We should now say a fatalist.
Coleridge's work on the "Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion," which has before been mentioned, was, if ever begun, never completed.]
21. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[Dated at end: January 18, 1797.]
Dear Col,--You have learnd by this time, with surprise, no doubt, that Lloyd is with me in town. The emotions I felt on his coming so unlooked for are not ill expressed in what follows, & what, if you do not object to them as too personal, & to the world obscure, or otherwise wanting in worth, I should wish to make a part of our little volume.
I shall be sorry if that vol comes out, as it necessarily must do, unless you print those very schoolboyish verses I sent you on not getting leave to come down to Bristol last Summer. I say I shall be sorry that I have addrest you in nothing which can appear in our joint volume.
So frequently, so habitually as you dwell on my thoughts, 'tis some wonder those thoughts came never yet in Contact with a poetical mood--But you dwell in my heart of hearts, and I love you in all the naked honesty of prose. God bless you, and all your little domestic circle--my tenderest remembrances to your Beloved Sara, & a smile and a kiss from me to your dear dear little David Hartley--The verses I refer to above, slightly amended, I have sent (forgetting to ask your leave, tho' indeed I gave them only your initials) to the Month: Mag: where they may possibly appear next month, and where I hope to recognise your Poem on Burns.
TO CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
Alone, obscure, without a friend, A cheerless, solitary thing, Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out? What offring can the stranger bring
Of social scenes, home-bred delights, That him in aught compensate may For Stowey's pleasant winter nights, For loves & friendships far away?
In brief oblivion to forego Friends, such as thine, so justly dear, And be awhile with me content To stay, a kindly loiterer, here--
For this a gleam of random joy, Hath flush'd my unaccustom'd cheek, And, with an o'er-charg'd bursting heart, I feel the thanks, I cannot speak.
O! sweet are all the Muses' lays, And sweet the charm of matin bird-- 'Twas long, since these estranged ears The sweeter voice of friend had heard.
The voice hath spoke: the pleasant sounds In memory's ear, in after time Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear, And sometimes prompt an honest rhyme.
For when the transient charm is fled, And when the little week is o'er, To cheerless, friendless solitude When I return, as heretofore--
Long, long, within my aching heart, The grateful sense shall cherishd be; I'll think less meanly of myself, That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.
1797.
O Col: would to God you were in London with us, or we two at Stowey with you all. Lloyd takes up his abode at the Bull & Mouth Inn,--the Cat & Salutation would have had a charm more forcible for me. O noctes caenaeque Deûm! Anglice--Welch rabbits, punch, & poesy.
Should you be induced to publish those very schoolboyish verses, print 'em as they will occur, if at all, in the Month: Mag: yet I should feel ashamed that to you I wrote nothing better. But they are too personal, & almost trifling and obscure withal. Some lines of mine to Cowper were in last Month: Mag: they have not body of thought enough to plead for the retaining of 'em.
My sister's kind love to you all.
C. LAMB.
[The verses to Lloyd were included in Coleridge's 1797 volume; but the verses concerning the frustrated Bristol holiday were omitted. Concerning this visit to London Charles Lloyd wrote to his brother Robert: "I left Charles Lamb very warmly interested in his favour, and have kept up a regular correspondence with him ever since; he is a most interesting young man." Only two letters from Lamb to Charles Lloyd have survived.
"We two"--Lamb and Lloyd. Not Lamb and his sister.]
22. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[Begun Sunday, February 5, 1797. Dated on address by mistake: January 5, 1797.]
Sunday Morning.--You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a pot girl. 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 listen'd to the wind;" "They wonder'd at me, who had known me once A chearful 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 touch'd not the pollutions of the Dead"--but your "fierce vivacity" is a faint copy of the "fierce & terrible benevolence" of Southey. Added to this, that it will look like rivalship in you, & extort a comparison with S,--I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, consider'd 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, & walk'd and talk'd 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 woeful blemishes, some of 'em sad deviations from that simplicity which was your aim. "Hail'd who might be near" (the canvas-coverture moving, by the by, is laughable); "a woman & six children" (by the way,--why not nine children, it would have been just half as pathetic again): "statues of sleep they seem'd." "Frost-mangled wretch:" "green putridity:" "hail'd him immortal" (rather ludicrous again): "voiced a sad and simple tale" (abominable!): "unprovender'd:" "such his tale:" "Ah! suffering to the height of what was suffer'd" (a most insufferable line): "amazements of affright:" "the hot sore brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture" (what shocking confusion of ideas!). In these delineations of common & natural feelings, in the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Roubigne's tenants, "much of his native loftiness remained in the execution." I was reading your Religious Musings the other day, & sincerely I think it the noblest poem in the language, next after the Paradise lost; & 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. "Stands in the sun, & with no partial gaze Views all creation"--I wish I could have written those lines. I rejoyce 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 & Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam into the wounds I may have been inflicting on my poor friend's vanity. In your notice of Southey's new volume you omit to mention the most pleasing of all, the Miniature "There were Who form'd 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, & 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 endeavour'd--I wish'd to 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 sun-vinegared. Your dream, down to that exquisite line--"I can't tell half his adventures," is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. The remainder is so so. The best line, I think, is, "He belong'd, I believe, to the witch Melancholy." By the way, when will our volume come out? Don't delay it till you have written a new Joan of Arc. Send what letters you please by me, & in any way you choose, single or double. The India Co. is better adapted to answer the cost than the generality of my friend's correspondents,--such poor & honest dogs as John Thelwall, particularly. I cannot say I know Colson, at least intimately. I once supped with him & 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 & 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.
Sunday Night.--You & Sara are very good to think so kindly & so favourably of poor Mary. I would to God all did so too. But I very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father's lifetime. It is very hard upon her. But our circumstances are peculiar, & we must submit to them. God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school; who used to toddle there to bring me fag, when I, school-boy like, only despised her for it, & used to be ashamed to see her come & sit herself down on the old coal hole steps as you went into the old grammar school, & opend her apron & bring out her bason, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me--the good old creature is now lying on her death bed. I cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. To the shock she received on that our evil day, from which she never completely recovered, I impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me. I was always her favourite: "No after friendship e'er can raise The endearments of our early days, Nor e'er the heart such fondness prove, As when it first began to love." Lloyd has kindly left me for a keep-sake, John Woolman. You have read it, he says, & like it. Will you excuse one short extract? I think it could not have escaped you:--"Small treasure to a resigned mind is sufficient. How happy is it to be content with a little, to live in humility, & feel that in us which breathes out this language--Abba! Father!"--I am almost ashamed to patch up a letter in this miscellaneous sort; but I please myself in the thought, that anything from me will be acceptable to you. I am rather impatient, childishly so, to see our names affixed to the same common volume. Send me two, when it does come out; 2 will be enough--or indeed 1--but 2 better. I have a dim recollection that, when in town, you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a long poem. Why not adopt it, Coleridge? there would be room for imagination. Or the description (from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the planets (the Moon, for instance). Or a Five Days' Dream, which shall illustrate, in sensible imagery, Hartley's 5 motives to conduct:--sensation (1), imagination (2), ambition (3), sympathy (4), Theopathy (5). 1st banquets, music, etc., effeminacy,--and their insufficiency. 2d "beds of hyacinth & roses, where young Adonis oft reposes;" "fortunate Isles;" "The pagan Elysium," etc., etc.; poetical pictures; antiquity as pleasing to the fancy;--their emptiness, madness, etc. 3d warriors, poets; some famous, yet more forgotten, their fame or oblivion now alike indifferent, pride, vanity, etc. 4th all manner of pitiable stories, in Spenser-like verse--love--friendship, relationship, &c. 5th Hermits--Christ and his apostles--martyrs--heaven--&c., etc. An imagination like yours, from these scanty hints, may expand into a thousand great Ideas--if indeed you at all comprehend my scheme, which I scarce do myself.
Monday Morn.--"A London letter. 9-1/2." Look you, master poet, I have remorse as well as another man, & my bowels can sound upon occasion. But I must put you to this charge, for I cannot keep back my protest, however ineffectual, against the annexing your latter lines to those former--this putting of new wine into old bottles. This my duty done, I will cease from writing till you invent some more reasonable mode of conveyance. Well may the "ragged followers of the nine" set up for flocci-nauci-what-do-you-call-'em-ists! And I do not wonder that in their splendid visions of Utopias in America they protest against the admission of those yellow-complexioned, copper-color'd, white-liver'd Gentlemen, who never proved themselves their friends. Don't you think your verses on a Young Ass too trivial a companion for the Religious Musings? "Scoundrel monarch," alter that; and the Man of Ross is scarce admissible as it now stands curtailed of its fairer half: reclaim its property from the Chatterton, which it does but encumber, & it will be a rich little poem. I hope you expunge great part of the old notes in the new edition. That, in particular, most barefaced unfounded impudent assertion, that Mr. Rogers is indebted for his story to Loch Lomond, a poem by Bruce! I have read the latter. I scarce think you have. Scarce anything is common to them both. The poor author of the Pleasures of Memory was sorely hurt, Dyer says, by the accusation of unoriginality. He never saw the Poem. I long to read your Poem on Burns; I retain so indistinct a memory of it. In what shape and how does it come into public? As you leave off writing poetry till you finish your Hymns, I suppose you print now all you have got by you. You have scarce enough unprinted to make a 2d volume with Lloyd. Tell me all about it. What is become of Cowper? Lloyd told me of some verses on his mother. If you have them by you, pray send 'em me. I do so love him! Never mind their merit. May be I may like 'em--as your taste and mine do not always exactly indentify. Yours,
LAMB.
[Coleridge intended to print in his new edition the lines that he had contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc, 1796, with certain additions, under the title "The Progress of Liberty; or, The Visions of the Maid of Orleans." Writing to Cottle Coleridge had said: "I much wish to send My Visions of the Maid of Arc and my corrections to Wordsworth ... and to Lamb, whose taste and judgment I see reason to think more correct and philosophical than my own, which yet I place pretty high." Lamb's criticisms are contained in this letter. Coleridge abandoned his idea of including the poem in the 1797 edition, and the lines were not separately published until 1817, in Sibylline Leaves, under the title "The Destiny of Nations."
"Montauban ... Roubigné." An illustration from Henry Mackenzie's novel Julia de Roubigné, 1777, from which Lamb took hints, a little later, for the structure of part of his story Rosamund Gray.
This is the passage in "Religious Musings" that Lamb particularly praises:--
There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind, Omnific. His most holy name is Love. Truth of subliming import! with the which Who feeds and saturates his constant soul, He from his small particular orbit flies With blest outstarting! From himself he flies, Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze Views all creation; and he loves it all, And blesses it, and calls it very good! This is indeed to dwell with the Most High! Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim Can press no nearer to the Almighty's throne.
Southey's new volume, which Coleridge had noticed, was his Poems, second edition, Vol. I., 1797. The poem in question was "On My Own Miniature Picture taken at Two Years of Age."
Edward Fairfax's "Tasso" (Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem) was published in 1600. John Hoole, a later translator, became principal auditor at the India House, and resigned in 1786. He died in 1803.
Coleridge's dream was the poem called "The Raven."
Citizen John Thelwall (1764-1834), to whom many of Coleridge's early letters are written, was a Jacobin enthusiast who had gone to the Tower with Thomas Hardy and Home Tooke in 1794, but was acquitted at his trial. At this time he was writing and lecturing on political subjects. When, in 1818, Thelwall acquired The Champion Lamb wrote squibs for it against the Regent and others.
Colson was perhaps Thomas Coulson, a friend of Sir Humphry Davy and the father of Walter Coulson (born? 1794) who was called "The Walking Encyclopaedia," and was afterwards a friend of Hazlitt.
"To discipline your young noviciate soul." A line from "Religious Musings," 1796:--
I discipline my young noviciate thought.
"My poor old aunt." Lamb's lines on his Aunt Hetty repeat some of this praise; as also does the Elia essay on "Christ's Hospital."
John Woolman (1720-1772), an American Quaker. His Works comprise A Journal of the Life, Gospel, Labours, and Christian Experiences of that Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman, and His Last Epistle and other Writings. Lamb often praised the book.
"A London letter, 9-1/2." A word on the postal system of those days may not be out of place. The cost of the letter when a frank had not been procured was borne by the recipient. The rate varied with the distance. The charge from London to Bridgewater in 1797 was sevenpence. Later it was raised to ninepence and tenpence. No regular post was set up between Bridgewater and Nether Stowey until 1808, when the cost of the carriage of a letter for the intervening nine miles was twopence.
"Flocci." See note on page II.
"The Young Ass," early versions, ended thus:--
Soothe to rest The tumult of some Scoundrel Monarch's breast.
Coleridge changed the last line to--
The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast.
Coleridge had asserted, in a 1796 note, that Rogers had taken the story of Florio in the Pleasures of Memory from Michael Bruce's Loch Leven (not Loch Lomond). In the 1797 edition another note made apology for the mistake.
Cowper's "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk" had been written in the spring of 1790. It is interesting to find Lamb reading them just now, for his own Blank Verse poems, shortly to be written, have much in common with Cowper's verses, not only in manner but in matter.]
23. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
Feb. 13th, 1797.
Your poem is altogether admirable--parts of it are even exquisite--in particular your personal account of the Maid far surpasses any thing of the sort in Southey. I perceived all its excellences, on a first reading, as readily as now you have been removing a supposed film from my eyes. I was only struck with [a] certain faulty disproportion in the matter and the style, which I still think I perceive, between these lines and the former ones. I had an end in view; I wished to make you reject the poem, only as being discordant with the other; and, in subservience to that end, it was politically done in me to over-pass, and make no mention of merit which, could you think me capable of overlooking, might reasonably damn for ever in your judgment all pretensions in me to be critical. There, I will be judged by Lloyd, whether I have not made a very handsome recantation. I was in the case of a man whose friend has asked him his opinion of a certain young lady; the deluded wight gives judgment against her in toto--don't like her face, her walk, her manners--finds fault with her eyebrows--can see no wit in her. His friend looks blank; he begins to smell a rat; wind veers about; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her manners which gains upon you after a short acquaintance,--and then her accurate pronunciation of the French language and a pretty uncultivated taste in drawing. The reconciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by the hand, and hopes he will do him the honour of taking a bit of dinner with Mrs.--and him--a plain family dinner--some day next week. "For, I suppose, you never heard we were married! I'm glad to see you like my wife, however; you'll come and see her, ha?" Now am I too proud to retract entirely. Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened; you are manifestly wedded to this poem, and what fancy has joined let no man separate. I turn me to the Joan of Arc, second book.
The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, "are silence to the mind." The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory concerning man's nature and his noblest destination--the philosophy of a first cause--of subordinate agents in creation superior to man--the subserviency of Pagan worship and Pagan faith to the introduction of a purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as winning with gradual steps her difficult way northward from Bethabra. After all this cometh Joan, a publican's daughter, sitting on an ale-house bench, and marking the swingings of the signboard, finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions emblematical of equality; which what the devil Joan had to do with, I don't know, or indeed with the French and American revolutions; though that needs no pardon, it is executed so nobly. After all, if you perceive no disproportion, all argument is vain: I do not so much object to parts. Again, when you talk of building your fame on these lines in preference to the "Religious Musings," I cannot help conceiving of you and of the author of that as two different persons, and I think you a very vain man.
I have been re-reading your letter. Much of it I could dispute; but with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their predispositions for fanaticism, I toto corde coincide; only I think that Southey's strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration,--these (I see no mighty difference between her describing them or you describing them), these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his poem, as is natural, will prefer his; if you surpass, prejudice will scarcely allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though your specimen at the conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals them. And in an account of a fanatic or of a prophet the description of her emotions is expected to be most highly finished. By the way, I spoke far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say, purposely. I should like you to specify or particularise; the story of the "Tottering Eld," of "his eventful years all come and gone," is too general; why not make him a soldier, or some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency of "cruel wrong and strange distress!" I think I should. When I laughed at the "miserable man crawling from beneath the coverture," I wonder I [? you] did not perceive it was a laugh of horror--such as I have laughed at Dante's picture of the famished Ugolino. Without falsehood, I perceive an hundred beauties in your narrative. Yet I wonder you do not perceive something out-of-the way, something unsimple and artificial, in the expression, "voiced a sad tale." I hate made-dishes at the muses' banquet. I believe I was wrong in most of my other objections. But surely "hailed him immortal," adds nothing to the terror of the man's death, which it was your business to heighten, not diminish by a phrase which takes away all terror from it. I like that line, "They closed their eyes in sleep, nor knew 'twas death." Indeed, there is scarce a line I do not like. "Turbid ecstacy," is surely not so good as what you had written, "troublous." Turbid rather suits the muddy kind of inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is, throughout, to my ears unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the measure of the "Religious Musings," which is exactly fitted to the thoughts.
You were building your house on a rock, when you rested your fame on that poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the licence of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery. Go on with your "Maid of Orleans," and be content to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it, when 'tis finished.
This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the "cherisher of infancy," and one must fall on these occasions into reflections which it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, "of chance and change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead. "Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; but let a man live many days and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many." Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it? Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn's "No Cross, no Crown;" I like it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some "inevitable presence." This cured me of Quakerism; I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling. In the midst of his inspiration--and the effects of it were most noisy--was handed into the midst of the meeting a most terrible blackguard Wapping sailor; the poor man, I believe, had rather have been in the hottest part of an engagement, for the congregation of broad-brims, together with the ravings of the prophet, were too much for his gravity, though I saw even he had delicacy enough not to laugh out. And the inspired gentleman, though his manner was so supernatural, yet neither talked nor professed to talk anything more than good sober sense, common morality, with now and then a declaration of not speaking from himself. Among other things, looking back to his childhood and early youth, he told the meeting what a graceless young dog he had been, that in his youth he had a good share of wit: reader, if thou hadst seen the gentleman, thou wouldst have sworn that it must indeed have been many years ago, for his rueful physiognomy would have scared away the playful goddess from the meeting, where he presided, for ever. A wit! a wit! what could he mean? Lloyd, it minded me of Falkland in the "Rivals," "Am I full of wit and humour? No, indeed you are not. Am I the life and soul of every company I come into? No, it cannot be said you are." That hard-faced gentleman, a wit! Why, Nature wrote on his fanatic forehead fifty years ago, "Wit never comes, that comes to all." I should be as scandalised at a bon mot issuing from his oracle-looking mouth, as to see Cato go down a country-dance. God love you all. You are very good to submit to be pleased with reading my nothings. 'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense re-spected.--Yours ever,
C. LAMB.
[Lamb's Aunt Hetty, Sarah Lamb, was buried at St. James's, Clerkenwell, on February 13, 1797.
"As poor Burns expresses it." In the "Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn," the Stanza:--
In weary being now I pine, For a' the life of life is dead, And hope has left my aged ken, On forward wing for ever fled.
"Turning Quaker." Lamb refers to the Peel meeting-house in John Street, Clerkenwell. Lamb afterwards used the story of the wit in the Ella essay "A Quaker's Meeting." In his invocation to the reader he here foreshadows his Elian manner.
"Falkland" is in Sheridan's comedy "The Rivals" (see Act II., Scene i).]
24. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
April 7th, 1797.
Your last letter was dated the 10th February; in it you promised to write again the next day. At least, I did not expect so long, so unfriend-like, a silence. There was a time, Col., when a remissness of this sort in a dear friend would have lain very heavy on my mind, but latterly I have been too familiar with neglect to feel much from the semblance of it. Yet, to suspect one's self overlooked and in the way to oblivion, is a feeling rather humbling; perhaps, as tending to self-mortification, not unfavourable to the spiritual state. Still, as you meant to confer no benefit on the soul of your friend, you do not stand quite clear from the imputation of unkindliness (a word by which I mean the diminutive of unkindness). Lloyd tells me he has been very ill, and was on the point of leaving you. I addressed a letter to him at Birmingham: perhaps he got it not, and is still with you, I hope his ill-health has not prevented his attending to a request I made in it, that he would write again very soon to let me know how he was. I hope to God poor Lloyd is not very bad, or in a very bad way. Pray satisfy me about these things. And then David Hartley was unwell; and how is the small philosopher, the minute philosopher? and David's mother? Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact [?course] questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me; do what you will, Col., you may hurt me and vex me by your silence, but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friendship[s] like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent, and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds. By the way, Lloyd may have told you about my sister. I told him. If not, I have taken her out of her confinement, and taken a room for her at Hackney, and spend my Sundays, holidays, etc., with her. She boards herself. In one little half year's illness, and in such an illness of such a nature and of such consequences! to get her out into the world again, with a prospect of her never being so ill again--this is to be ranked not among the common blessings of Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart, and make me as thankful, as in my distress I was earnest, in my prayers. Congratulate me on an ever-present and never-alienable friend like her. And do, do insert, if you have not lost, my dedication. It will have lost half its value by coming so late. If you really are going on with that volume, I shall be enabled in a day or two to send you a short poem to insert. Now, do answer this. Friendship, and acts of friendship, should be reciprocal, and free as the air; a friend should never be reduced to beg an alms of his fellow. Yet I will beg an alms; I entreat you to write, and tell me all about poor Lloyd, and all of you. God love and preserve you all.
C. LAMB.
[Lloyd's domestication with Coleridge had been intermittent. It began in September, 1796; in November Lloyd was very ill; in December Coleridge told Mr. Lloyd that he would retain his son no longer as pupil but merely as a lodger and friend; at Christmas Charles Lloyd was at Birmingham; in January he was in London; in March he was ill again and his experiment with Coleridge ended.
"The minute philosopher." A joking reference to Bishop Berkeley's Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher.
For the dedication to which Lamb refers see above.]
25. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
April 15th, 1797.
A VISION OF REPENTANCE
I saw a famous fountain in my dream, Where shady pathways to a valley led; A weeping willow lay upon that stream, And all around the fountain brink were spread Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad, Forming a doubtful twilight desolate and sad.
The place was such, that whoso enter'd in Disrobed was of every earthly thought, And straight became as one that knew not sin, Or to the world's first innocence was brought; Enseem'd it now, he stood on holy ground, In sweet and tender melancholy wrapt around.
A most strange calm stole o'er my soothed sprite; Long time I stood, and longer had I staid, When lo! I saw, saw by the sweet moonlight, Which came in silence o'er that silent shade, Where near the fountain SOMETHING like DESPAIR Made of that weeping willow garlands for her hair.
And eke with painful fingers she inwove Many an uncouth stem of savage thorn-- "The willow garland, that was for her Love, And these her bleeding temples would adorn." With sighs her heart nigh burst--salt tears fast fell, As mournfully she bended o'er that sacred well.
To whom when I addrest myself to speak, She lifted up her eyes, and nothing said; The delicate red came mantling o'er her cheek, And gathering up her loose attire, she fled To the dark covert of that woody shade And in her goings seem'd a timid gentle maid.
Revolving in my mind what this should mean, And why that lovely Lady plained so; Perplex'd in thought at that mysterious scene, And doubting if 'twere best to stay or go, I cast mine eyes in wistful gaze around, When from the shades came slow a small and plaintive sound
"Psyche am I, who love to dwell In these brown shades, this woody dell, Where never busy mortal came, Till now, to pry upon my shame.
"At thy feet what thou dost see The Waters of Repentance be, Which, night and day, I must augment With tears, like a true penitent, If haply so my day of grace Be not yet past; and this lone place, O'er-shadowy, dark, excludeth hence All thoughts but grief and penitence."
"_Why dost thou weep, thou gentle maid! And wherefore in this barren shade Thy hidden thoughts with sorrow feed? Can thing so fair repentance need?_"
"Oh! I have done a deed of shame, And tainted is my virgin fame, And stain'd the beauteous maiden white In which my bridal robes were dight."
"_And who the promis'd spouse declare, And what those bridal garments were_?"
"Severe and saintly righteousness Compos'd the clear white bridal dress; Jesus, the son of Heaven's high King Bought with his blood the marriage ring.
"A wretched sinful creature, I Deem'd lightly of that sacred tye, Gave to a treacherous WORLD my heart, And play'd the foolish wanton's part.
"Soon to these murky shades I came To hide from the Sun's light my shame-- And still I haunt this woody dell, And bathe me in that healing well, Whose waters clear have influence From sin's foul stains the soul to cleanse; And night and day I them augment With tears, like a true Penitent, Until, due expiation made, And fit atonement fully paid, The Lord and Bridegroom me present Where in sweet strains of high consent, God's throne before, the Seraphim Shall chaunt the extatic marriage hymn."
"Now Christ restore thee soon"--I said, And thenceforth all my dream was fled.
The above you will please to print immediately before the blank verse fragments. Tell me if you like it. I fear the latter half is unequal to the former, in parts of which I think you will discover a delicacy of pencilling not quite un-Spenser-like. The latter half aims at the measure, but has failed to attain the poetry, of Milton in his "Comus" and Fletcher in that exquisite thing ycleped the "Faithful Shepherdess," where they both use eight-syllable lines. But this latter half was finished in great haste, and as a task, not from that impulse which affects the name of inspiration.
By the way, I have lit upon Fairfax's "Godfrey of Bullen" for half-a-crown. Rejoice with me.
Poor dear Lloyd! I had a letter from him yesterday; his state of mind is truly alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine unopened three weeks, afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him; and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one, wherein he informed me that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing. You will pray with me, I know, for his recovery; for surely, Coleridge, an exquisiteness of feeling like this must border on derangement. But I love him more and more, and will not give up the hope of his speedy recovery, as he tells me he is under Dr. Darwin's regimen.
God bless us all, and shield us from insanity, which is "the sorest malady of all."
My kind love to your wife and child.
C. LAMB.
Pray write, now.
[I have placed the poem at the head from the text of Coleridge's Poems, 1797; but the version of the letter very likely differed (see next letter for at least one alteration).
Fairfax's Godfrey of Bullen was his translation of Tasso, which is mentioned above.
Lloyd, who was undergoing one of those attacks of acute melancholia to which he was subject all his life, had been sent to Lichfield where Erasmus Darwin had established a sanatorium.
"The sorest malady of all." From Lamb's lines to Cowper.]
26. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
[Tuesday,] June 13th, 1797.
I stared with wild wonderment to see thy well-known hand again. It revived many a pleasing recollection of an epistolary intercourse, of late strangely suspended, once the pride of my life. Before I even opened thy letter, I figured to myself a sort of complacency which my little hoard at home would feel at receiving the new-comer into the little drawer where I keep my treasures of this kind. You have done well in writing to me. The little room (was it not a little one?) at the Salutation was already in the way of becoming a fading idea! it had begun to be classed in my memory with those "wanderings with a fair hair'd maid," in the recollection of which I feel I have no property. You press me, very kindly do you press me, to come to Stowey; obstacles, strong as death, prevent me at present; maybe I shall be able to come before the year is out; believe me, I will come as soon as I can, but I dread naming a probable time. It depends on fifty things, besides the expense, which is not nothing. Lloyd wants me to come and see him; but, besides that you have a prior claim on me, I should not feel myself so much at home with him, till he gets a house of his own. As to Richardson, caprice may grant what caprice only refused, and it is no more hardship, rightly considered, to be dependent on him for pleasure, than to lie at the mercy of the rain and sunshine for the enjoyment of a holiday: in either case we are not to look for a suspension of the laws of nature. "Grill will be Grill." Vide Spenser.
I could not but smile at the compromise you make with me for printing Lloyd's poems first; but there is [are] in nature, I fear, too many tendencies to envy and jealousy not to justify you in your apology. Yet, if any one is welcome to pre-eminence from me, it is Lloyd, for he would be the last to desire it. So pray, let his name uniformly precede mine, for it would be treating me like a child to suppose it could give me pain. Yet, alas! I am not insusceptible of the bad passions. Thank God, I have the ingenuousness to be ashamed of them. I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd; he is all goodness, and I have too much of the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his friendship.
Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakspeare was a more modest man; but you best know your own power.
Of my last poem you speak slightingly; surely the longer stanzas were pretty tolerable; at least there was one good line in it,
"Thick-shaded trees, with dark green leaf rich clad."
To adopt your own expression, I call this a "rich" line, a fine full line. And some others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, my little gentleman will feel some repugnance at riding behind in the basket; though, I confess, in pretty good company. Your picture of idiocy, with the sugar-loaf head, is exquisite; but are you not too severe upon our more favoured brethren in fatuity? Lloyd tells me how ill your wife and child have been. I rejoice that they are better. My kindest remembrances and those of my sister. I send you a trifling letter; but you have only to think that I have been skimming the superficies of my mind, and found it only froth. Now, do write again; you cannot believe how I long and love always to hear about you. Yours, most affectionately,
CHARLES LAMB.
Monday Night.
["Little drawer where I keep ..." Lamb soon lost the habit of keeping any letters, except Manning's.
"Wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid." Lamb's own line. See sonnet quoted above.
Lamb's visit to Stowey was made in July, as we shall see.
"Grill will be Grill." See the Faerie Queene, Book II., Canto 12, Stanzas 86 and 87. "Let Gryll be Gryll" is the right text.
Lloyd had joined the poetical partnership, and his poems were to precede Lamb's in the 1797 volume. "Lloyd's connections," Coleridge had written to Cottle, "will take off a great many [copies], more than a hundred."
Coleridge's tragedy was "Osorio," of which we hear first in March, 1797, when Coleridge tells Cottle that Sheridan has asked him to write a play for Drury Lane. It was finished in October, and rejected. In 1813, much altered, it was performed under its new title, "Remorse," and published in book form. Lamb wrote the Prologue.
The "last poem" of which Lamb speaks was "The Vision of Repentance." The good line was altered to--
"Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad,"
when the poem appeared in the Appendix ("the basket," as Lamb calls it) of the 1797 volume.
"Your picture of idiocy." Compare S. T. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, dated "Greta Hall, Oct. 5, 1801" (Thomas Poole and His Friends): "We passed a poor ideot boy, who exactly answered my description; he
"'Stood in the sun, rocking his sugar-loaf head, And staring at a bough from morn to sunset, See-sawed his voice in inarticulate noises.'"
See this passage, much altered, in "Remorse," II., I, 186-191. The lines do not occur in "Osorio," yet they, or something like them, must have been copied out by Coleridge for Lamb in June, 1797.]
Letter 27
(Possibly only a fragment)
CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[Saturday,] June 24th, 1797.
Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kosciusko while he was at Bristol? I never saw a hero; I wonder how they look. I have been reading a most curious romance-like work, called the "Life of John Buncle, Esq." 'Tis very interesting, and an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects, from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth. There is much abstruse science in it above my cut and an infinite fund of pleasantry. John Buncle is a famous fine man, formed in nature's most eccentric hour. I am ashamed of what I write. But I have no topic to talk of. I see nobody, and sit, and read or walk, alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family, who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day, I see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a distance; worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are not yet familiarised to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-flowing serenity and peace. What right have I to obtrude all this upon you? what is such a letter to you? and if I come to Stowey, what conversation can I furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy, those delightful treasures of wisdom, which I know he will open to me? But it is better to give than to receive; and I was a very patient hearer and docile scholar in our winter evening meetings at Mr. May's; was I not, Col.? What I have owed to thee, my heart can ne'er forget.
God love you and yours. C. L.
Saturday.
[Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746-1817), the Polish patriot, to whom Coleridge had a sonnet in his Poems, 1796, visited England and America after being liberated from prison on the accession of Paul I., and settled in France in 1798.
The Life of John Buncle, Esq., a book which Lamb (and also Hazlitt) frequently praised, is a curious digressive novel, part religious, part roystering, and wholly eccentric and individual, by Thomas Amory, published, Vol. I., in 1756, and Vol. II., in 1766.
"Mr. May's." See note to the first letter.]
Letter 28
(Possibly only a fragment)
CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[No date. ? June 29, 1797.]
I discern a possibility of my paying you a visit next week. May I, can I, shall I, come so soon? Have you room for me, leisure for me, and are you all pretty well? Tell me all this honestly--immediately. And by what day--coach could I come soonest and nearest to Stowey? A few months hence may suit you better; certainly me as well. If so, say so. I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do I desire to see you, to come among you--to see the young philosopher, to thank Sara for her last year's invitation in person--to read your tragedy--to read over together our little book--to breathe fresh air--to revive in me vivid images of "Salutation scenery." There is a sort of sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip out of my mind and memory. Still that knave Richardson remaineth--a thorn in the side of Hope, when she would lean towards Stowey. Here I will leave off, for I dislike to fill up this paper, which involves a question so connected with my heart and soul, with meaner matter or subjects to me less interesting. I can talk, as I can think, nothing else.
C. LAMB.
Thursday.
["Our little book." Coleridge's Poems, second edition.
"Salutation scenery." See note to the first letter.
"Richardson." See note on page 34.]
29. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[No date. Probably July 19 or 26, 1797.]
I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you, or so subsided into my wonted uniformity of feeling, as to sit calmly down to think of you and write to you. But I reason myself into the belief that those few and pleasant holidays shall not have been spent in vain. I feel improvement in the recollection of many a casual conversation. The names of Tom Poole, of Wordsworth and his good sister, with thine and Sara's, are become "familiar in my mouth as household words." You would make me very happy, if you think W. has no objection, by transcribing for me that inscription of his. I have some scattered sentences ever floating on my memory, teasing me that I cannot remember more of it. You may believe I will make no improper use of it. Believe me I can think now of many subjects on which I had planned gaining information from you; but I forgot my "treasure's worth" while I possessed it. Your leg is now become to me a matter of much more importance--and many a little thing, which when I was present with you seemed scarce to indent my notice, now presses painfully on my remembrance. Is the Patriot come yet? Are Wordsworth and his sister gone yet? I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater, and had I met him, I think it would have moved almost me to tears. You will oblige me too by sending me my great-coat, which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at parting--is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly behind?--at present I have none--so send it me by a Stowey waggon, if there be such a thing, directing for C. L., No. 45, Chapel-Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, that Inscription!--it will recall to me the tones of all your voices--and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could not talk much, while I was with you, but my silence was not sullenness, nor I hope from any bad motive; but, in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole's, and at Cruikshank's, most like a sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did.
Are you and your dear Sara--to me also very dear, because very kind--agreed yet about the management of little Hartley? and how go on the little rogue's teeth? I will see White to-morrow, and he shall send you information on that matter; but as perhaps I can do it as well after talking with him, I will keep this letter open.
My love and thanks to you and all of you.
C. L.
Wednesday Evening.
[Lamb spent a week at Nether Stowey in July, 1797. Coleridge tells Southey of this visit in a letter written in that month: "Charles Lamb has been with me for a week. He left me Friday morning. The second day after Wordsworth [who had just left Racedown, near Crewkerne, for Alfoxden, near Stowey] came to me, dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb's stay and still prevents me from all walks longer than a furlong." This is the cause of Lamb's allusion to Coleridge's leg, and it also produced Coleridge's poem beginning "This lime-tree bower my prison," addressed to Lamb, which opens as follows, the friends in the fourth line being Lamb, Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. (Wordsworth was then twenty-seven. The Lyrical Ballads were to be written in the next few months.)
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, Lam'd by the scathe of fire, lonely and faint, This lime-tree bower my prison! They, meantime My Friends, whom I may never meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge Wander delighted, and look down, perchance, On that same rifted Dell, where many an ash Twists its wild limbs beside the ferny rock Whose plumy ferns forever nod and drip, Spray'd by the waterfall. But chiefly thou My gentle-hearted Charles! thou who had pin'd And hunger'd after Nature many a year, In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet bowed soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity!
Tom Poole was Thomas Poole (1765-1837), a wealthy tanner, and Coleridge's friend, correspondent and patron, who lived at Stowey.
The Patriot and John Thelwall were one. See note on page 93.
"That inscription," The "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree," written in 1795. Lamb refers to it again in 1815.
The address at Pentonville is the first indication given by Lamb that he has left Little Queen Street. We last saw him there for certain in Letter 17 on December 9. The removal had been made probably at the end of 1796.
John Cruikshank, a neighbour of Coleridge, had married a Miss Budé on the same day that Coleridge married Sara Flicker.
Of the business connected with White we know nothing.]
30. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[P.M. August 24, 1797.]
Poor Charles Lloyd came to me about a fortnight ago. He took the opportunity of Mr. Hawkes coming to London, and I think at his request, to come with him. It seemed to me, and he acknowledged it, that he had come to gain a little time and a little peace, before he made up his mind. He was a good deal perplexed what to do--wishing earnestly that he had never entered into engagements which he felt himself unable to fulfill, but which on Sophia's account he could not bring himself to relinquish. I could give him little advice or comfort, and feeling my own inability painfully, eagerly snatched at a proposal he made me to go to Southey's with him for a day or two. He then meant to return with me, who could stay only one night. While there, he at one time thought of going to consult you, but changed his intention and stayed behind with Southey, and wrote an explicit letter to Sophia. I came away on the Tuesday, and on the Saturday following, last Saturday, receiv'd a letter dated Bath, in which he said he was on his way to Birmingham,--that Southey was accompanying him,--and that he went for the purpose of persuading Sophia to a Scotch marriage--I greatly feared, that she would never consent to this, from what Lloyd had told me of her character. But waited most anxiously the result. Since then I have not had one letter. For God's sake, if you get any intelligence of or from Chas Lloyd, communicate it, for I am much alarmed.
C. LAMB.
I wrote to Burnett what I write now to you,--was it from him you heard, or elsewhere?--
He said if he had come to you, he could never have brought himself to leave you. In all his distress he was sweetly and exemplarily calm and master of himself,--and seemed perfectly free from his disorder.--
How do you all at?
[This letter is unimportant, except in showing Lamb's power of sharing his friends' troubles. Charles Lloyd was not married to Sophia Pemberton, of Birmingham, until 1799; nothing rash being done, as Lamb seems to think possible. The reference to Southey, who was at this time living at Burton, in Hampshire, throws some light on De Quincey's statement, in his "Autobiography," that owing to the objection of Miss Pemberton's parents to the match, Lloyd secured the assistance of Southey to carry the lady off.
Burnett was George Burnett (1776?-1811), one of Coleridge's fellow Pantisocratists, whom we shall meet later.
The "he" of the second postscript is not Burnett, but Lloyd.]
Letter 31
CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [About September 20, 1797.]
WRITTEN A TWELVEMONTH AFTER THE EVENTS
[Friday next, Coleridge, is the day on which my mother died.]
Alas! how am I changed! where be the tears, The sobs and forced suspensions of the breath, And all the dull desertions of the heart With which I hung o'er my dear mother's corse? Where be the blest subsidings of the storm Within; the sweet resignedness of hope Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love, In which I bow'd me to my Father's will? My God and my Redeemer, keep not thou My heart in brute and sensual thanklessness Seal'd up, oblivious ever of that dear grace, And health restor'd to my long-loved friend.
Long loved, and worthy known! Thou didst not keep Her soul in death. O keep not now, my Lord, Thy servants in far worse--in spiritual death And darkness--blacker than those feared shadows O' the valley all must tread. Lend us thy balms, Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick soul, And heal our cleansed bosoms of the wounds With which the world hath pierc'd us thro' and thro'! Give us new flesh, new birth; Elect of heaven May we become, in thine election sure Contain'd, and to one purpose steadfast drawn-- Our souls' salvation.
Thou and I, dear friend, With filial recognition sweet, shall know One day the face of our dear mother in heaven, And her remember'd looks of love shall greet With answering looks of love, her placid smiles Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.
Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask Those days of vanity to return again, (Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give), Vain loves, and "wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid;" (Child of the dust as I am), who so long My foolish heart steep'd in idolatry, And creature-loves. Forgive it, O my Maker! If in a mood of grief, I sin almost In sometimes brooding on the days long past, (And from the grave of time wishing them back), Days of a mother's fondness to her child-- Her little one! Oh, where be now those sports And infant play-games? Where the joyous troops Of children, and the haunts I did so love? 0 my companions! O ye loved names Of friend, or playmate dear, gone are ye now. Gone divers ways; to honour and credit some: And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame! I only am left, with unavailing grief One parent dead to mourn, and see one live Of all life's joys bereft, and desolate: Am left, with a few friends, and one above The rest, found faithful in a length of years, Contented as I may, to bear me on, T' the not unpeaceful evening of a day Made black by morning storms.
The following I wrote when I had returned from C. Lloyd, leaving him behind at Burton with Southey. To understand some of it, you must remember that at that time he was very much perplexed in mind.
A stranger and alone, I past those scenes We past so late together; and my heart Felt something like desertion, as I look'd Around me, and the pleasant voice of friend Was absent, and the cordial look was there No more, to smile on me. I thought on Lloyd-- All he had been to me! And now I go Again to mingle with a world impure; With men who make a mock of holy things, Mistaken, and of man's best hope think scorn. The world does much to warp the heart of man; And I may sometimes join its idiot laugh: Of this I now complain not. Deal with me, Omniscient Father, as Thou judgest best, And in Thy season soften thou my heart. I pray not for myself: I pray for him Whose soul is sore perplexed. Shine thou on him, Father of Lights! and in the difficult paths Make plain his way before him: his own thoughts May he not think--his own ends not pursue-- So shall he best perform Thy will on earth. Greatest and Best, Thy will be ever ours!
The former of these poems I wrote with unusual celerity t'other morning at office. I expect you to like it better than anything of mine; Lloyd does, and I do myself.
You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you.
For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher to adapt it to my feelings:--
"I am prouder That I was once your friend, tho' now forgot, Than to have had another true to me."
If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry, and call you hard names--Manchineel and I don't know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand, and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off, and that is transitory.
"When time drives flocks from field to fold, When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,"
I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter, of a friend's neglect--cold, cold, cold! Remembrance where remembrance is due.
C. LAMB.
[The two poems included in this letter were printed in Blank Verse, a volume which Lamb and Lloyd issued in 1798.
Coleridge had written to Lloyd, we know, as late as July, because he sent him a version of the poem "This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison;" but a coolness that was to ripen into positive hostility had already begun. Of this we shall see more later.
The passage from Beaumont and Fletcher is in "The Maid's Tragedy" (Act II., Scene I), where Aspatia says to Amintor:--
Thus I wind myself Into this willow garland, and am prouder That I was once your love (though now refus'd) Than to have had another true to me.
The scene is in Lamb's Dramatic Specimens.
The reference to Manchineel is explained by a passage in Coleridge's dedication of his 1797 volume, then just published, to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, where, speaking of the friends he had known, he says:--
and some most false, False and fair-foliag'd as the Manchineel, Have tempted me to slumber in their shade
--the manchineel being a poisonous West Indian tree.
Between this and the next letter probably came correspondence that has now been lost.]
32. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
January 28th, 1798.
You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them. I don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes, or I should have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. To you I owe much under God. In my brief acquaintance with you in London, your conversations won me to the better cause, and rescued me from the polluting spirit of the world. I might have been a worthless character without you; as it is, I do possess a certain improvable portion of devotional feelings, tho' when I view myself in the light of divine truth, and not according to the common measures of human judgment, I am altogether corrupt and sinful. This is no cant. I am very sincere.
These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me unprepared. My former calamities produced in me a spirit of humility and a spirit of prayer. I thought they had sufficiently disciplined me; but the event ought to humble me. If God's judgments now fail to take away from me the heart of stone, what more grievous trials ought I not to expect? I have been very querulous, impatient under the rod--full of little jealousies and heartburnings.--I had well nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd; and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The truth is, I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent; he continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation, rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which, in times past, I knew had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more constantly with him; but he was living with White, a man to whom I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings, tho' from long habits of friendliness, and many a social and good quality, I loved him very much. I met company there sometimes--indiscriminate company. Any society almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly, when alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world, but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I became, as he complained, "jaundiced" towards him ... but he has forgiven me--and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness--but I want more religion--I am jealous of human helps and leaning-places. I rejoice in your good fortunes. May God at the last settle you!--You have had many and painful trials; humanly speaking they are going to end; but we should rather pray that discipline may attend us thro' the whole of our lives ... A careless and a dissolute spirit has advanced upon me with large strides--pray God that my present afflictions may be sanctified to me! Mary is recovering, but I see no opening yet of a situation for her; your invitation went to my very heart, but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's being with you.
I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be with duller fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other. In answer to your suggestions of occupation for me, I must say that I do not think my capacity altogether suited for disquisitions of that kind.... I have read little, I have a very weak memory, and retain little of what I read; am unused to composition in which any methodising is required; but I thank you sincerely for the hint, and shall receive it as far as I am able: that is, endeavour to engage my mind in some constant and innocent pursuit. I know my capacities better than you do.
Accept my kindest love, and believe me yours, as ever.
C. L.
[The first letter that has been preserved since September of the previous year. In the meantime Lamb had begun to work on Rosamund Gray, probably upon an impulse gained from the visit to Stowey, and was also arranging to join Lloyd, who was living in London with White, in the volume of poems to be called Blank Verse. Southey, writing many years later to Edward Moxon, said of Lloyd and White: "No two men could be imagined more unlike each other; Lloyd had no drollery in his nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will easily understand how Lamb could sympathise with both."
The new calamity to which Lamb refers in this letter was probably a relapse in Mary Lamb's condition. When he last mentioned her she was so far better as to be able to be moved into lodgings at Hackney: all that good was now undone. Coleridge seems to have suggested that she should visit Stowey.
It was about this time that Lamb wrote the poem "The Old Familiar Faces," which I quote below in its original form, afterwards changed by the omission of the first four lines:--
THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES
Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?
I had a mother, but she died, and left me, Died prematurely in a day of horrors-- All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days-- All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies-- All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women. Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her-- All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man. Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly; Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood. Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse, Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother! Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? So might we talk of the old familiar faces.
For some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
January, 1798.
It is conjectured by Mr. J. A. Rutter, and there is much reason to believe it a right theory, especially when taken into connection with the present letter, that Lloyd was the friend of the fifth stanza and Coleridge the friend of the seventh. The italicised half line might refer to "Anna," but, since she is mentioned in the fourth stanza, it more probably, I think, refers to Mary Lamb, who, as we have seen, had been so ill as to necessitate removal from Hackney into more special confinement again.
The letter was addressed to Coleridge at the Reverend A. Rowe's, Shrewsbury. Coleridge had been offered the Unitarian pulpit at Shrewsbury and was on the point of accepting when he received news of the annuity of £150 which Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood had settled upon him.
Between this letter and the next certainly came other letters to Coleridge, now lost, one of which is referred to by Coleridge in the letter to Lamb quoted below.]
33. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
[No date. Early Summer, 1798.]
THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE
1. Whether God loves a lying Angel better than a true Man?
2. Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth? and if he could whether he would?
3. Whether Honesty be an angelic virtue? or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the Schoolmen term 'Virtutes minus splendidoe et terrae et hominis participes'?
4. Whether the higher order of Seraphim Illuminati ever sneer?
5. Whether pure intelligences can love?
6. Whether the Seraphim Ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
7. Whether the Vision Beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment to each individual Angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?
8 and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be damned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?
Learned Sir, my Friend,
Presuming on our long habits of friendship and emboldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in case I want any knowledge, (which I intend to do when I have no Encyclopaedia or Lady's Magazine at hand to refer to in any matter of science,) I now submit to your enquiries the above Theological Propositions, to be by you defended, or oppugned, or both, in the Schools of Germany, whither I am told you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire and regret of universal England; but to my own individual consolation if thro' the channel of your wished return, Learned Sir, my Friend, may be transmitted to this our Island, from those famous Theological Wits of Leipsic and Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English Halls and Colleges. Finally, wishing, Learned Sir, that you may see Schiller and swing in a wood (vide Poems) and sit upon a Tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia,
I remain, Your friend and docile Pupil to instruct CHARLES LAMB. 1798.
To S. T. Coleridge.
[Lamb's last letter to Coleridge for two years. See note to the next letter.
Lamb's reading of Thomas Aquinas probably was at the base of his theses. William Godwin, in his "History of Knowledge, Learning and Taste in Great Britain," which had run through some years of the New Annual Register, cited, in 1786, a number of the more grotesque queries of the old Schoolmen. Mr. Kegan Paul suggested that Lamb went to Godwin for his examination paper; but I should think this very unlikely. Some of the questions hit Coleridge very hard.
This letter was first printed by Joseph Cottle in his Early Recollections, 1837, with the remark: "Mr. Coleridge gave me this letter, saying, 'These young visionaries will do each other no good.'" It marks an epoch in Lamb's life, since it brought about, or, at any rate, clinched, the only quarrel that ever subsisted between Coleridge and himself.
The story is told in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. Briefly, Lloyd had left Coleridge in the spring of 1797; a little later, in a state of much perplexity, he had carried his troubles to Lamb, and to Southey, between whom and Coleridge no very cordial feeling had existed for some time, rather than to Coleridge himself, his late mentor. That probably fanned the flame. The next move came from Coleridge. He printed in the Monthly Magazine for November, 1797, three sonnets signed Nehemiah Higginbottom, burlesquing instances of "affectation of unaffectedness," and "puny pathos" in the poems of himself, of Lamb, and of Lloyd, the humour of which Lamb probably did not much appreciate, since he believed in the feelings expressed in his verse, while Lloyd was certainly unfitted to esteem it. Coleridge effected even more than he had contemplated, for Southey took the sonnet upon Simplicity as an attack upon himself, which did not, however, prevent him, a little later, from a similar exercise in ponderous humour under the too similar name of Abel Shufflebottom.
In March, 1798, when a new edition of Coleridge's 1797 Poems was in contemplation, Lloyd wrote to Cottle, the publisher, asking that he would persuade Coleridge to omit his (Lloyd's) portion, a request which Coleridge probably resented, but which gave him the opportunity of replying that no persuasion was needed for the omission of verses published at the earnest request of the author.
Meanwhile a worse offence than all against Coleridge was perpetrated by Lloyd. In the spring of 1798 was published at Bristol his novel, Edmund Oliver, dedicated to Lamb, in which Coleridge's experiences in the army, under the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberback, in 1793-1794, and certain of Coleridge's peculiarities, including his drug habit, were utilised. Added to this, Lloyd seems to have repeated both to Lamb and Southey, in distorted form, certain things which Coleridge had said of them, either in confidence, or, at any rate, with no wish that they should be repeated; with the result that Lamb actually went so far as to take sides with Lloyd against his older friend. The following extracts from a letter from Coleridge to Lamb, which I am permitted by Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge to print, carries the story a little farther:--
[Spring of 1798.]
Dear Lamb,--Lloyd has informed me through Miss Wordsworth that you intend no longer to correspond with me. This has given me little pain; not that I do not love and esteem you, but on the contrary because I am confident that your intentions are pure. You are performing what you deem a duty, and humanly speaking have that merit which can be derived from the performance of a painful duty. Painful, for you would not without struggles abandon me in behalf of a man [Lloyd] who, wholly ignorant of all but your name, became attached to you in consequence of my attachment, caught his from my enthusiasm, and learned to love you at my fireside, when often while I have been sitting and talking of your sorrows and afflictions I have stopped my conversations and lifted up wet eyes and prayed for you. No! I am confident that although you do not think as a wise man, you feel as a good man.
From you I have received little pain, because for you I suffer little alarm. I cannot say this for your friend; it appears to me evident that his feelings are vitiated, and that his ideas are in their combination merely the creatures of those feelings. I have received letters from him, and the best and kindest wish which, as a Christian, I can offer in return is that he may feel remorse....
When I wrote to you that my Sonnet to Simplicity was not composed with reference to Southey, you answered me (I believe these were the words): "It was a lie too gross for the grossest ignorance to believe;" and I was not angry with you, because the assertion which the grossest ignorance would believe a lie the Omniscient knew to be truth. This, however, makes me cautious not too hastily to affirm the falsehood of an assertion of Lloyd's that in Edmund Oliver's love-fit, leaving college, and going into the army he had no sort of allusion to or recollection of my love-fit, leaving college, and going into the army, and that he never thought of my person in the description of Oliver's person in the first letter of the second volume. This cannot appear stranger to me than my assertion did to you, and therefore I will suspend my absolute faith....
I have been unfortunate in my connections. Both you and Lloyd became acquainted with me when your minds were far from being in a composed or natural state, and you clothed my image with a suit of notions and feelings which could belong to nothing human. You are restored to comparative saneness, and are merely wondering what is become of the Coleridge with whom you were so passionately in love; Charles Lloyd's mind has only changed his disease, and he is now arraying his ci-devant Angel in a flaming San Benito--the whole ground of the garment a dark brimstone and plenty of little devils flourished out in black. Oh, me! Lamb, "even in laughter the heart is sad!"...
God bless you S. T. COLERIDGE.
One other passage. In a letter from Lloyd at Birmingham to Cottle, dated June, 1798, Lloyd says, in response to Cottle's suggestion that he should visit Coleridge, "I love Coleridge, and can forget all that has happened. At present I could not well go to Stowey.... Lamb quitted me yesterday, after a fortnight's visit. I have been much interested in his society. I never knew him so happy in my life. I shall write to Coleridge to-day." Coleridge left for Germany in September.
"Schiller and swing in a wood." An allusion to Coleridge's sonnet to Schiller:--
Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood Wand'ring at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Here should perhaps come Lamb's first letter to Robert Lloyd, not available for this edition, but printed by Canon Ainger, and in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, where it is dated October. Lamb's first letter is one of advice, apparently in reply to some complaints of his position addressed to him by Lloyd. A second and longer letter which, though belonging to August, 1798, may be mentioned here, also counsels, commending the use of patience and humility. Lamb is here seen in the character of a spiritual adviser. The letter is unique in his correspondence.
Robert Lloyd was a younger brother of Charles Lloyd, and Lamb had probably met him when on his visit to Birmingham in the summer. The boy, then not quite twenty, was apprenticed to a Quaker draper at Saffron Walden in Essex.]
34. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Saturday, July 28th, 1798.
I am ashamed that I have not thanked you before this for the "Joan of Arc," but I did not know your address, and it did not occur to me to write through Cottle. The poem delighted me, and the notes amused me, but methinks she of Neufchatel, in the print, holds her sword too "like a dancer." I sent your notice to Phillips, particularly requesting an immediate insertion, but I suppose it came too late. I am sometimes curious to know what progress you make in that same "Calendar:" whether you insert the nine worthies and Whittington? what you do or how you can manage when two Saints meet and quarrel for precedency? Martlemas, and Candlemas, and Christmas, are glorious themes for a writer like you, antiquity-bitten, smit with the love of boars' heads and rosemary; but how you can ennoble the 1st of April I know not. By the way I had a thing to say, but a certain false modesty has hitherto prevented me: perhaps I can best communicate my wish by a hint,--my birthday is on the 10th of February, New Style; but if it interferes with any remarkable event, why rather than my country should lose her fame, I care not if I put my nativity back eleven days. Fine family patronage for your "Calendar," if that old lady of prolific memory were living, who lies (or lyes) in some church in London (saints forgive me, but I have forgot what church), attesting that enormous legend of as many children as days in the year. I marvel her impudence did not grasp at a leap-year. Three hundred and sixty-five dedications, and all in a family--you might spit in spirit on the oneness of Maecenas' patronage!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia--"Poor Lamb (these were his last words), if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me,"--in ordinary cases, I thanked him, I have an "Encyclopaedia" at hand, but on such an occasion as going over to a German university, I could not refrain from sending him the following propositions, to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.
THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE
I
"Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?"
II
"Whether the archangel Uriel could knowingly affirm an untruth, and whether, if he could, he would?"
III
"Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather belonging to that class of qualities which the schoolmen term 'virtutes minus splendidæ et hominis et terræ nimis participes?'"
IV
"Whether the seraphim ardentes do not manifest their goodness by the way of vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial, and merely human virtue?"
V
"Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer?"
VI
"Whether pure intelligences can love, or whether they love anything besides pure intellect?"
VII
"Whether the beatific vision be anything more or less than a perpetual representment to each individual angel of his own present attainments, and future capabilities, something in the manner of mortal looking-glasses?"
VIII
"Whether an 'immortal and amenable soul' may not come to be damned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?"
Samuel Taylor C. had not deigned an answer; was it impertinent of me to avail myself of that offered source of knowledge? Lloyd is returned to town from Ipswich where he has been with his brother. He has brought home three acts of a Play which I have not yet read. The scene for the most part laid in a Brothel. O tempora, O mores! but as friend Coleridge said when he was talking bawdy to Miss ---- "to the pure all things are pure."
Wishing "Madoc" may be born into the world with as splendid promise as the second birth or purification of the Maid of Neufchatel,--I remain yours sincerely,
C. LAMB.
I hope Edith is better; my kindest remembrances to her. You have a good deal of trifling to forgive in this letter.
[This is Lamb's first letter to Southey that has been preserved. Probably others came before it. Southey now becomes Lamb's chief correspondent for some months. In Canon Ainger's transcript the letter ends with "Love and remembrances to Cottle."
Southey's Joan of Arc, second edition, had been published by Cottle in 1798. It has no frontispiece: the print of Joan of Arc must have come separately.
Phillips was Sir Richard Phillips (1767-1840), editor of the Monthly Magazine and the publisher satirised in Sorrow's Lavengro.
The Calendar ultimately became the Annual Anthology. Southey had at first an idea of making it a poetical calendar or almanac.
"That old lady of prolific memory." Lamb is thinking, I imagine, of the story in Howell's Familiar Letters (also in Evelyn's Diary) of the "Wonder of Nature" near the Hague. "That Wonder of Nature is a Church-monument, where an Earl and a Lady are engraven with 365 Children about them, which were all deliver'd at one Birth." The story tells that a beggar woman with twins asked alms of the Countess, who denying that it was possible for two children to be born at once and vilifying the beggar, that woman cursed her and called upon God to show His judgment upon her by causing her to bear "at one birth as many Children as there are days in the year, which she did before the same year's end, having never born Child before." Howell seems to have been convinced of the authenticity of the story by the spectacle of the christening basin used by the family. The beggar, who spoke on the third day of the year, meant as many days as had been in that year--three.
Edith was Southey's wife.]
35. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Oct. 18th, 1798.
Dear Southey,--I have at last been so fortunate as to pick up Wither's Emblems for you, that "old book and quaint," as the brief author of "Rosamund Gray" hath it; it is in a most detestable state of preservation, and the cuts are of a fainter impression than I have seen. Some child, the curse of antiquaries and bane of bibliopolical rarities, hath been dabbling in some of them with its paint and dirty fingers, and in particular hath a little sullied the author's own portraiture, which I think valuable, as the poem that accompanies it is no common one; this last excepted, the Emblems are far inferior to old Quarles. I once told you otherwise, but I had not then read old Q. with attention. I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for ninepence!!! O tempora! O lectores!--so that if you have lost or parted with your own copy, say so, and I can furnish you, for you prize these things more than I do. You will be amused, I think, with honest Wither's "Supersedeas to all them whose custom it is, without any deserving, to importune authors to give unto them their books." I am sorry 'tis imperfect, as the lottery board annexed to it also is. Methinks you might modernise and elegantise this Supersedeas, and place it in front of your "Joan of Arc," as a gentle hint to Messrs. Park, &c. One of the happiest emblems and comicalest cuts is the owl and little chirpers, page 63.
Wishing you all amusement, which your true emblem-fancier can scarce fail to find in even bad emblems, I remain your caterer to command,
C. LAMB.
Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well. How does your Calendar prosper?
[This letter contains Lamb's first reference to Rosamund Gray, his only novel, which had been published a little earlier in the year. "Wither's Emblems, an 'old book and quaint,'" was one of the few volumes belonging to old Margaret, Rosamund's grandmother (Chapter I). See next letter and note.
Wither's Emblems was published in 1635; Quarles' in the same year. I give Wither's "Supersedeas" in the Appendix to my large edition, vol. vii., together with a reproduction of the owl and little chirpers from the edition of 1635.]
36. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
[October 29, 1798.]
Dear Southey,--I thank you heartily for the Eclogue; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite: and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some circumstances in the conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been described in prose and verse; what if you had accomplished Joanna's ruin by the clumsy arts and rustic gifts of some country-fellow? I am thinking, I believe, of the song,
"An old woman clothed in grey, Whose daughter was charming and young, And she was deluded away By Roger's false nattering tongue."
A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character: I think you might paint him very well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so, indeed, it is; but, in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me upon scribbling my "Rosamund." But I thank you heartily for the poem. Not having anything of my own to send you in return--though, to tell truth, I am at work upon something, which if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps I might send you an extract or two that might not displease you; but I will not do that; and whether it will come to anything, I know not, for I am as slow as a Fleming painter when I compose anything. I will crave leave to put down a few lines of old Christopher Marlow's; I take them from his tragedy, "The Jew of Malta." The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be discommended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the witches and fairies of Marlow's mighty successor. The scene is betwixt Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamora, a Turkish captive exposed to sale for a slave.
BARABAS (A precious rascal.)
"As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about, and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See'm go pinioned along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian: There I enriched the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells; And, after that, was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of serving [helping] Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. Then after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals, And every moon made some or other mad; And now and then one hang'd himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll. How I with interest tormented him."
Now hear Ithamore, the other gentle nature, explain how he spent his time:--
ITHAMORE (A comical dog.)
"Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire, Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves. One time I was an hostler at [in] an inn, And in the night-time secretly would I steal To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats. Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd, I strowed powder on the marble stones, And therewithal their knees would rankle so, That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples Go limping home to Christendom on stilts."
BARABAS
"Why, this is something"--
There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines, brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your old description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true Hogarthian style. I need not tell you that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, "Come live with me, and be my Love," and of the tragedy of "Edward II.," in which are certain lines unequalled in our English tongue. Honest Walton mentions the said madrigal under the denomination of "certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlow."
I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects to Edith.
Yours sincerely, C. LAMB.
[The eclogue was "The Ruined Cottage," in which Joanna and her widowed mother are at first as happy as Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret. As in Lamb's story so in Southey's poem, this state of felicity is overturned by a seducer.
"An old woman clothed in gray." This ballad still eludes research. Lamb says that the first line put him upon writing Rosamund Gray, but he is generally supposed to have taken his heroine's name from a song by Charles Lloyd, entitled "Rosamund Gray," published among his Poems in 1795. At the end of the novel Matravis, the seducer, in his ravings, sings the ballad.
The "something" upon which Lamb was then at work was his play "John Woodvil," in those early days known as "Pride's Cure."
"Your old description of cruelty in hell." In "Joan of Arc." See Letter 3.
"If I do not put up those eclogues." Lamb does not return to this subject.
Lloyd had just gone to Cambridge, to Caius College.]
37. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Nov. 3, 1798.
I have read your Eclogue ["The Wedding"] repeatedly, and cannot call it bald, or without interest; the cast of it, and the design are completely original, and may set people upon thinking: it is as poetical as the subject requires, which asks no poetry; but it is defective in pathos. The woman's own story is the tamest part of it--I should like you to remould that--it too much resembles the young maid's history: both had been in service. Even the omission would not injure the poem; after the words "growing wants," you might, not unconnectedly, introduce "look at that little chub" down to "welcome one." And, decidedly, I would have you end it somehow thus,
"Give them at least this evening a good meal. Gives her money. Now, fare thee well; hereafter you have taught me To give sad meaning to the village-bells," &c.,
which would leave a stronger impression (as well as more pleasingly recall the beginning of the Eclogue), than the present common-place reference to a better world, which the woman "must have heard at church." I should like you, too, a good deal to enlarge the most striking part, as it might have been, of the poem--"Is it idleness?" &c., that affords a good field for dwelling on sickness and inabilities, and old age. And you might also a good deal enrich the piece with a picture of a country wedding: the woman might very well, in a transient fit of oblivion, dwell upon the ceremony and circumstances of her own nuptials six years ago, the smugness of the bride-groom, the feastings, the cheap merriment, the welcomings, and the secret envyings of the maidens--then dropping all this, recur to her present lot. I do not know that I can suggest anything else, or that I have suggested anything new or material.
I shall be very glad to see some more poetry, though I fear your trouble in transcribing will be greater than the service my remarks may do them.
Yours affectionately,
C. LAMB.
I cut my letter short because I am called off to business.
38. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Nov. 8th, 1798.
I do not know that I much prefer this Eclogue [Lamb has received 'The Last of the Flock'] to the last ['The Wedding']; both are inferior to the former ['The Ruined Cottage'].
"And when he came to shake me by the hand, And spake as kindly to me as he used, I hardly knew his voice--"
is the only passage that affected me.
Servants speak, and their language ought to be plain, and not much raised above the common, else I should find fault with the bathos of this passage:
"And when I heard the bell strike out, I thought (what?) that I had never heard it toll So dismally before."
I like the destruction of the martens' old nests hugely, having just such a circumstance in my memory.[1] I should be very glad to see your remaining Eclogue, if not too much trouble, as you give me reason to expect it will be the second best.
I perfectly accord with your opinion of Old Wither. Quarles is a wittier writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart. Quarles thinks of his audience when he lectures; Wither soliloquises in company with a full heart. What wretched stuff are the "Divine Fancies" of Quarles! Religion appears to him no longer valuable than it furnishes matter for quibbles and riddles; he turns God's grace into wantonness. Wither is like an old friend, whose warm-heartedness and estimable qualities make us wish he possessed more genius, but at the same time make us willing to dispense with that want. I always love W., and sometimes admire Q. Still that portrait poem is a fine one; and the extract from "The Shepherds' Hunting" places him in a starry height far above Quarles. If you wrote that review in "Crit. Rev.," I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the "Ancient Marinere;"--so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit, but more severity, "A Dutch Attempt," &c., I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in that part,
"A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware--"
It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct; at least I must allege something against you both, to excuse my own dotage--
"So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be!"--&c., &c.
But you allow some elaborate beauties--you should have extracted 'em. "The Ancient Marinere" plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you that I am
Sincerely yours,
C. LAMB.
I am going to meet Lloyd at Ware on Saturday, to return on Sunday. Have you any commands or commendations to the metaphysician? I shall be very happy if you will dine or spend any time with me in your way through the great ugly city; but I know you have other ties upon you in these parts.
Love and respects to Edith, and friendly remembrances to Cottle.
[Footnote 1: The destruction of the martens' nests, in "The Last of the Family," runs thus:--
I remember, Eight months ago, when the young Squire began To alter the old mansion, they destroy'd The martins' nests, that had stood undisturb'd Under that roof, ... ay! long before my memory. I shook my head at seeing it, and thought No good could follow.]
[Lamb's ripe judgment of Wither will be found in his essay "On the Poetical Works of George Wither," in the Works, 1818 (see Vol. I. of this edition). "The portrait poem" would be "The Author's Meditation upon Sight of His Picture," prefixed to Emblems, 1635.
Lyrical Ballads, by Wordsworth and Coleridge, had just been published by Cottle. "The Ancient Mariner" stood first. "That last poem" was Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey." Southey (?) reviewed the book in the Critical Review for October, 1798. Of the "Ancient Mariner" he said: "It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit."
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated November 13, 1798, not available for this edition. Robert Lloyd seems to have said in his last letter that the world was drained of all its sweets. Lamb sends him a beautiful passage in praise of the world's good things--the first foretaste in the correspondence of his later ecstatic manner.
Here also should come a letter from Lamb to Southey, which apparently does not now exist, containing "The Dying Lover," an extract from Lamb's play. I have taken the text from the version of the play sent to Manning late in 1800.
THE DYING LOVER
Margaret. ... I knew a youth who died For grief, because his Love proved so, And married to another. I saw him on the wedding day, For he was present in the church that day, And in his best apparel too, As one that came to grace the ceremony. I mark'd him when the ring was given, His countenance never changed; And when the priest pronounced the marriage blessing, He put a silent prayer up for the bride, For they stood near who saw his lips move. He came invited to the marriage-feast With the bride's friends, And was the merriest of them all that day; But they, who knew him best, call'd it feign'd mirth; And others said, He wore a smile like death's upon his face. His presence dash'd all the beholders' mirth, And he went away in tears. Simon. What followed then? Marg. Oh! then He did not as neglected suitors use Affect a life of solitude in shades, But lived, In free discourse and sweet society, Among his friends who knew his gentle nature best. Yet ever when he smiled, There was a mystery legible in his face, That whoso saw him said he was a man Not long for this world.-- And true it was, for even then The silent love was feeding at his heart Of which he died: Nor ever spake word of reproach, Only he wish'd in death that his remains Might find a poor grave in some spot, not far From his mistress' family vault, "being the place Where one day Anna should herself be laid."
The line in italics Lamb crossed through in the Manning copy. The last four lines he crossed through and marked "very bad." I have reproduced them here because of the autobiographical hint contained in the word Anna, which was the name given by Lamb to his "fair-haired maid" in his love sonnets.]
Letter 39
CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY [Probably November, 1798.]
The following is a second Extract from my Tragedy that is to be,--'tis narrated by an old Steward to Margaret, orphan ward of Sir Walter Woodvil;--this, and the Dying Lover I gave you, are the only extracts I can give without mutilation. I expect you to like the old woman's curse:
Old Steward.--One summer night, Sir Walter, as it chanc'd, Was pacing to & fro in the avenue That westward fronts our house, Among those aged oaks, said to have been planted Three hundred years ago By a neighb'ring Prior of the Woodvil name, But so it was, Being overtask't in thought, he heeded not The importune suitor who stood by the gate, And beg'd an alms. Some say he shov'd her rudely from the gate With angry chiding; but I can never think (Sir Walter's nature hath a sweetness in it) That he would use a woman--an old woman-- With such discourtesy; For old she was who beg'd an alms of him. Well, he refus'd her; Whether for importunity, I know not, Or that she came between his meditations. But better had he met a lion in the streets Than this old woman that night; For she was one who practis'd the black arts. And served the devil--being since burn'd for witchcraft. She look'd at him like one that meant to blast him, And with a frightful noise ('Twas partly like a woman's voice, And partly like the hissing of a snake) She nothing said but this (Sir Walter told the words):
"A mischief, mischief, mischief, And a nine-times killing curse, By day and by night, to the caitive wight Who shakes the poor like snakes from his door, And shuts up the womb of his purse; And a mischief, mischief, mischief, And a nine-fold withering curse,-- For that shall come to thee, that will render thee Both all that thou fear'st, and worse."
These words four times repeated, she departed, Leaving Sir Walter like a man beneath Whose feet a scaffolding had suddenly fal'n: So he describ'd it. Margaret.--A terrible curse! Old Steward.--O Lady, such bad things are told of that old woman, As, namely, that the milk she gave was sour, And the babe who suck'd her shrivel'd like a mandrake; And things besides, with a bigger horror in them, Almost, I think, unlawful to be told! Margaret.--Then must I never hear them. But proceed, And say what follow'd on the witch's curse. Old Steward.--Nothing immediate; but some nine months after, Young Stephen Woodvil suddenly fell sick, And none could tell what ail'd him: for he lay, And pin'd, and pin'd, that all his hair came off; And he, that was full-flesh'd, became as thin As a two-months' babe that hath been starved in the nursing;-- And sure, I think, He bore his illness like a little child, With such rare sweetness of dumb melancholy He strove to clothe his agony in smiles, Which he would force up in his poor, pale cheeks, Like ill-tim'd guests that had no proper business there;-- And when they ask'd him his complaint, he laid His hand upon his heart to show the place Where Satan came to him a nights, he said, And prick'd him with a pin.-- And hereupon Sir Walter call'd to mind The Beggar Witch that stood in the gateway, And begg'd an alms-- Margaret.--I do not love to credit Tales of magic. Heav'n's music, which is order, seems unstrung; And this brave world, Creation's beauteous work, unbeautified, Disorder'd, marr'd, where such strange things are acted.
This is the extract I brag'd of, as superior to that I sent you from Marlow. Perhaps you smile; but I should like your remarks on the above, as you are deeper witch-read than I.
[The passage quoted in this letter, with certain alterations, became afterwards "The Witch," a dramatic sketch independent of "John Woodvil." By the phrase "without mutilation," Lamb possibly means to suggest that Southey should print this sketch and "The Dying Lover" in the Annual Anthology. That was not, however, done. "The Witch" was first printed in the Works, 1818.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, postmarked November 20, 1798, not available for this edition. In this letter Lamb sends Lloyd the extract from "The Witch" that was sent to Southey.]
40. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Nov. 28th, 1798.
I can have no objection to your printing "Mystery of God" with my name and all due acknowledgments for the honour and favour of the communication; indeed, 'tis a poem that can dishonour no name. Now, that is in the true strain of modern modesto-vanitas ... But for the sonnet, I heartily wish it, as I thought it was, dead and forgotten. If the exact circumstances under which I wrote could be known or told, it would be an interesting sonnet; but to an indifferent and stranger reader it must appear a very bald thing, certainly inadmissible in a compilation. I wish you could affix a different name to the volume; there is a contemptible book, a wretched assortment of vapid feelings, entitled "Pratt's Gleanings," which hath damned and impropriated the title for ever. Pray think of some other. The gentleman is better known (better had he remained unknown) by an Ode to Benevolence, written and spoken for and at the annual dinner of the Humane Society, who walk in procession once a-year, with all the objects of their charity before them, to return God thanks for giving them such benevolent hearts.
I like "Bishop Bruno;" but not so abundantly as your "Witch Ballad," which is an exquisite thing of its kind.
I showed my "Witch" and "Dying Lover" to Dyer last night; but George could not comprehend how that could be poetry which did not go upon ten feet, as George and his predecessors had taught it to do; so George read me some lectures on the distinguishing qualities of the Ode, the Epigram, and the Epic, and went home to illustrate his doctrine by correcting a proof sheet of his own Lyrics. George writes odes where the rhymes, like fashionable man and wife, keep a comfortable distance of six or eight lines apart, and calls that "observing the laws of verse." George tells you, before he recites, that you must listen with great attention, or you'll miss the rhymes. I did so, and found them pretty exact. George, speaking of the dead Ossian, exclaimeth, "Dark are the poet's eyes." I humbly represented to him that his own eyes were dark [? light], and many a living bard's besides, and recommended "Clos'd are the poet's eyes." But that would not do. I found there was an antithesis between the darkness of his eyes and the splendour of his genius; and I acquiesced.
Your recipe for a Turk's poison is invaluable and truly Marlowish.... Lloyd objects to "shutting-up the womb of his purse" in my Curse (which for a Christian witch in a Christian country is not too mild, I hope); do you object? 1 think there is a strangeness in the idea, as well as "shaking the poor like snakes from his door," which suits the speaker. Witches illustrate, as fine ladies do, from their own familiar objects, and snakes and the shutting up of wombs are in their way. I don't know that this last charge has been before brought against 'em, nor either the sour milk or the mandrake babe; but I affirm these be things a witch would do if she could.
My Tragedy will be a medley (as [? and] I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity; at least, it is not a fault in my intention, if it does not comprehend most of these discordant colours. Heaven send they dance not the "Dance of Death!" I hear that the Two Noble Englishmen have parted no sooner than they set foot on German earth, but I have not heard the reason--possibly, to give novelists an handle to exclaim, "Ah me! what things are perfect?" I think I shall adopt your emendation in the "Dying Lover," though I do not myself feel the objection against "Silent Prayer."
My tailor has brought me home a new coat lapelled, with a velvet collar. He assures me everybody wears velvet collars now. Some are born fashionable, some achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant, have fashion thrust upon them. The rogue has been making inroads hitherto by modest degrees, foisting upon me an additional button, recommending gaiters; but to come upon me thus in a full tide of luxury, neither becomes him as a tailor nor the ninth of a man. My meek gentleman was robbed the other day, coming with his wife and family in a one-horse shay from Hampstead; the villains rifled him of four guineas, some shillings and half-pence, and a bundle of customers' measures, which they swore were bank-notes. They did not shoot him, and when they rode off he addrest them with profound gratitude, making a congee: "Gentlemen, I wish you good night, and we are very much obliged to you that you have not used us ill!" And this is the cuckoo that has had the audacity to foist upon me ten buttons on a side and a black velvet collar--A damn'd ninth of a scoundrel!
When you write to Lloyd, he wishes his Jacobin correspondents to address him as Mr. C. L. Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well.
Yours sincerely, C. LAMB.
[The poem "Mystery of God" was, when printed in the Annual Anthology for 1799, entitled "Living without God in the World." Lamb never reprinted it. It is not clear to what sonnet Lamb refers, possibly that to his sister, printed on page 78, which he himself never reprinted. It was at that time intended to call Southey's collection Gleanings; Lamb refers to the Gleanings of Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749-1814), a very busy maker of books, published in 1795-1799. His Triumph of Benevolence was published in 1786.
Southey's witch ballad was "The Old Woman of Berkeley."
George Dyer's principal works in verse are contained in his Poems, 1802, and Poetics, 1812. He retained the epithet "dark" for Ossian's eyes.
Southey's recipe for a Turk's poison I do not find. It may have existed only in a letter.
A reference to the poem in Letter 39 will explain the remarks about witches' curses.
The Two Noble Englishmen (a sarcastic reference drawn, I imagine from Palamon and Arcite) were Coleridge and Wordsworth, then in Germany. Nothing definite is known, but they seem quite amicably to have decided to take independent courses.
"Lloyd's Jacobin correspondents." This is Lamb's only allusion to the attack which had been made by The Anti-Jacobin upon himself, Lloyd and their friends, particularly Coleridge and Southey. In "The New Morality," in the last number of Canning's paper, they had been thus grouped:--
And ye five other wandering Bards that move In sweet accord of harmony and love, C-----dge and S--tb--y, L--d, and L--be & Co. Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux!
--Lepaux being the high-priest of Theophilanthropy. When "The New Morality" was reprinted in The Beauties of "The AntiJacobin" in 1799, a savage footnote on Coleridge was appended, accusing him of hypocrisy and the desertion of his wife and children, and adding "Ex uno disce his associates Southey and Lamb." Again, in the first number of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, August, 1798, was a picture by Gilray, representing the worshippers of Lepaux, wherein Lloyd and Lamb appeared as a toad and a frog reading their own Blank Verse, and Coleridge and Southey, as donkeys, flourish "Dactylics" and "Saphics." In September the federated poets were again touched upon in a parody of the "Ode to the Passions":--
See! faithful to their mighty dam, C----dge, S--th--y, L--d, and L--b In splay-foot madrigals of love, Soft moaning like the widow'd dove, Pour, side-by-side, their sympathetic notes; Of equal rights, and civic feasts, And tyrant kings, and knavish priests, Swift through the land the tuneful mischief floats.
And now to softer strains they struck the lyre, They sung the beetle or the mole, The dying kid, or ass's foal, By cruel man permitted to expire.
Lloyd took the caricature and the verses with his customary seriousness, going so far as to indite a "Letter to The Anti-Jacobin Reviewers," which was printed in Birmingham in 1799. Therein he defended Lamb with some vigour: "The person you have thus leagued in a partnership of infamy with me is Mr. Charles Lamb, a man who, so far from being a democrat, would be the first person to assent to the opinions contained in the foregoing pages: he is a man too much occupied with real and painful duties--duties of high personal self-denial--to trouble himself about speculative matters."]
41. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Dec. 27, 1798.
Dear Southey,--Your friend John May has formerly made kind offers to Lloyd of serving me in the India house by the interest of his friend Sir Francis Baring--It is not likely that I shall ever put his goodness to the test on my own account, for my prospects are very comfortable. But I know a man, a young man, whom he could serve thro' the same channel, and I think would be disposed to serve if he were acquainted with his case. This poor fellow (whom I know just enough of to vouch for his strict integrity & worth) has lost two or three employments from illness, which he cannot regain; he was once insane, & from the distressful uncertainty of his livelihood has reason to apprehend a return of that malady--He has been for some time dependant on a woman whose lodger he formerly was, but who can ill afford to maintain him, and I know that on Christmas night last he actually walk'd about the streets all night, rather than accept of her Bed, which she offer'd him, and offer'd herself to sleep in the kitchen, and that in consequence of that severe cold he is labouring under a bilious disorder, besides a depression of spirits, which incapacitates him from exertion when he most needs it--For God's sake, Southey, if it does not go against you to ask favors, do it now--ask it as for me--but do not do a violence to your feelings, because he does not know of this application, and will suffer no disappointment--What I meant to say was this--there are in the India house what are called Extra Clerks, not on the Establishment, like me, but employed in Extra business, by-jobs--these get about £50 a year, or rather more, but never rise--a Director can put in at any time a young man in this office, and it is by no means consider'd so great a favor as making an established Clerk. He would think himself as rich as an Emperor if he could get such a certain situation, and be relieved from those disquietudes which I do fear may one day bring back his distemper--
You know John May better than I do, but I know enough to believe that he is a good man--he did make me that offer I have mention'd, but you will perceive that such an offer cannot authorize me in applying for another Person.
But I cannot help writing to you on the subject, for the young man is perpetually before my eyes, and I should feel it a crime not to strain all my petty interest to do him service, tho' I put my own delicacy to the question by so doing--I have made one other unsuccessful attempt already--
At all events I will thank you to write, for I am tormented with anxiety--
I suppose you have somewhere heard that poor Mary Dollin has poisoned herself, after some interviews with John Reid, the ci-devant Alphonso of her days of hope.
How is Edith?
C. LAMB.
[John May was a friend and correspondent of Southey whom he had met at Lisbon: not to be confounded with Coleridge's inn-keeping May.
Sir Francis Baring was a director of the East India Company. 1 have no knowledge as to who the young man was; nor have I any regarding Mary Dollin and John Reid.]
42. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Jan. 21st, 1799.
I am requested by Lloyd to excuse his not replying to a kind letter received from you. He is at present situated in most distressful family perplexities, which I am not at liberty to explain; but they are such as to demand all the strength of his mind, and quite exclude any attention to foreign objects. His brother Robert (the flower of his family) hath eloped from the persecutions of his father, and has taken shelter with me. What the issue of his adventure will be, I know not. He hath the sweetness of an angel in his heart, combined with admirable firmness of purpose: an uncultivated, but very original, and, I think, superior genius. But this step of his is but a small part of their family troubles.
I am to blame for not writing to you before on my own account; but I know you can dispense with the expressions of gratitude, or I should have thanked you before for all May's kindness. He has liberally supplied the person I spoke to you of with money, and had procured him a situation just after himself had lighted upon a similar one and engaged too far to recede. But May's kindness was the same, and my thanks to you and him are the same. May went about on this business as if it had been his own. But you knew John May before this: so I will be silent.
I shall be very glad to hear from you when convenient. I do not know how your Calendar and other affairs thrive; but, above all, I have not heard a great while of your "Madoc"--the opus magnum. I would willingly send you something to give a value to this letter; but I have only one slight passage to send you, scarce worth the sending, which I want to edge in somewhere into my play, which, by the way, hath not received the addition of ten lines, besides, since I saw you. A father, old Walter Woodvil (the witch's PROTÉGÉ) relates this of his son John, who "fought in adverse armies," being a royalist, and his father a parliamentary man:--
"I saw him in the day of Worcester fight, Whither he came at twice seven years, Under the discipline of the Lord Falkland (His uncle by the mother's side, Who gave his youthful politics a bent Quite from the principles of his father's house;) There did I see this valiant Lamb of Mars, This sprig of honour, this unbearded John, This veteran in green years, this sprout, this Woodvil, (With dreadless ease guiding a fire-hot steed, Which seem'd to scorn the manage of a boy), Prick forth with such a mirth into the field, To mingle rivalship and acts of war Even with the sinewy masters of the art,-- You would have thought the work of blood had been A play-game merely, and the rabid Mars Had put his harmful hostile nature off, To instruct raw youth in images of war, And practice of the unedged players' foils. The rough fanatic and blood-practised soldiery Seeing such hope and virtue in the boy, Disclosed their ranks to let him pass unhurt, Checking their swords' uncivil injuries, As loth to mar that curious workmanship Of Valour's beauty pourtray'd in his face."
Lloyd objects to "pourtray'd in his face,"--do you? I like the line.
I shall clap this in somewhere. I think there is a spirit through the lines; perhaps the 7th, 8th, and 9th owe their origin to Shakspeare, though no image is borrowed.
He says in "Henry the Fourth"--
"This infant Hotspur, Mars in swathing clothes."
[See Pt. I., III., 2, 111, 112.]
But pray did Lord Falkland die before Worcester fight? In that case I must make bold to unclify some other nobleman.
Kind love and respects to Edith.
C. LAMB.
[Charles Lloyd's perplexities turned probably once again on the question of his marriage. How long Robert Lloyd was with Lamb we do not know; nor of what nature were the "persecutions" to which he was subjected. According to the evidence at our disposal, Charles Lloyd, sen., was a good father.
Southey's Madoc was not published until 1805.
The passage from the play was not printed in John Woodvil. This, together with "The Dying Lover" are to be found only in the discarded version, printed in the Notes to Vol. IV. of the present edition. Lord Falkland had been killed at Newbury eight years before Worcester fight. Lamb altered the names to Ashley and Naseby, although Sir Anthony Cooper was not made Lord Ashley until sixteen years after Naseby was fought.]
43. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
[Late January or early February, 1799.]
Dr. Southey,--Lloyd will now be able to give you an account of himself, so to him I leave you for satisfaction. Great part of his troubles are lightened by the partial recovery of his sister, who had been alarmingly ill with similar diseases to his own. The other part of the family troubles sleeps for the present, but I fear will awake at some future time to confound and disunite. He will probably tell you all about it. Robert still continues here with me, his father has proposed nothing, but would willingly lure him back with fair professions. But Robert is endowed with a wise fortitude, and in this business has acted quite from himself, and wisely acted. His parents must come forward in the End. I like reducing parents to a sense of undutifulness. I like confounding the relations of life. Pray let me see you when you come to town, and contrive to give me some of your company.
I thank you heartily for your intended presents, but do by no means see the necessity you are under of burthening yourself thereby. You have read old Wither's Supersedeas to small purpose. You object to my pauses being at the end of my lines. I do not know any great difficulty I should find in diversifying or changing my blank verse; but I go upon the model of Shakspere in my Play, and endeavour after a colloquial ease and spirit, something like him. I could so easily imitate Milton's versification; but my ear & feeling would reject it, or any approaches to it, in the drama. I do not know whether to be glad or sorry that witches have been detected aforetimes in shutting up of wombs. I certainly invented that conceit, and its coincidence with fact is incidental [? accidental], for I never heard it. I have not seen those verses on Col. Despard--I do not read any newspapers. Are they short, to copy without much trouble? I should like to see them.
I just send you a few rhymes from my play, the only rhymes in it--a forest-liver giving an account of his amusements:--
What sports have you in the forest? Not many,--some few,--as thus. To see the sun to bed, and see him rise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him: With all his fires and travelling glories round him: Sometimes the moon on soft night-clouds to rest, Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast, And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep: Sometimes outstretch'd in very idleness, Nought doing, saying little, thinking less, To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air, Go eddying round; and small birds how they fare, When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn, Filch'd from the careless Amalthea's horn; And how the woods berries and worms provide, Without their pains, when earth hath nought beside To answer their small wants; To view the graceful deer come trooping by, Then pause, and gaze, then turn they know not why, Like bashful younkers in society; To mark the structure of a plant or tree; And all fair things of earth, how fair they be! &c. &c.
I love to anticipate charges of unoriginality: the first line is almost Shakspere's:--
"To have my love to bed & to arise." Midsummer Nights Dream [III., I, 174].
I think there is a sweetness in the versification not unlike some rhymes in that exquisite play, and the last line but three is yours:
"An eye That met the gaze, or turn'd it knew not why." Rosamund's Epistle.
I shall anticipate all my play, and have nothing to shew you. An idea for Leviathan:--
Commentators on Job have been puzzled to find out a meaning for Leviathan,--'tis a whale, say some; a crocodile, say others. In my simple conjecture, Leviathan is neither more nor less than the Lord Mayor of London for the time being.
"Rosamund" sells well in London, maugre the non-reviewal of it.
I sincerely wish you better health, & better health to Edith, Kind remembrances to her.
C. LAMB.
If you come to town by Ash Wednesday [February 6], you will certainly see Lloyd here--I expect him by that time.
My sister Mary was never in better health or spirits than now.
[Writing in June, 1799, to Robert Lloyd, Priscilla, his sister, says: "Lamb would not I think by any means be a person to take up your abode with. He is too much like yourself--he would encourage those feelings which it certainly is your duty to suppress. Your station in life--the duties which are pointed out by that rank in society which you are destined to fill--differ widely from his." When next we hear of Robert Lloyd he has returned to Birmingham, where his father soon afterwards bought him a partnership in a bookselling and printing business.
"Col. Despard." I have not found the verses. Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, after a career that began brilliantly, was imprisoned in the spring of 1798 and executed for High Treason in 1803.
The rhymed passage from John Woodvil is that which is best known. Hazlitt relates that Godwin was so taken with it when he first read it that he asked every one he met to tell him the author and play, and at last applied to Lamb himself.]
Letter 44
CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY March 15th, 1799.
Dear Southey,--I have received your little volume, for which I thank you, though I do not entirely approve of this sort of intercourse, where the presents are all one side. I have read the last Eclogue again with great pleasure. It hath gained considerably by abridgment, and now I think it wants nothing but enlargement. You will call this one of tyrant Procrustes' criticisms, to cut and pull so to his own standard; but the old lady is so great a favourite with me, I want to hear more of her; and of "Joanna" you have given us still less. But the picture of the rustics leaning over the bridge, and the old lady travelling abroad on a summer evening to see her garden watered, are images so new and true, that I decidedly prefer this "Ruin'd Cottage" to any poem in the book. Indeed I think it the only one that will bear comparison with your "Hymn to the Penates" in a former volume.
I compare dissimilar things, as one would a rose and a star for the pleasure they give us, or as a child soon learns to choose between a cake and a rattle; for dissimilars have mostly some points of comparison. The next best poem, I think, is the First Eclogue; 'tis very complete, and abounding in little pictures and realities. The remainder Eclogues, excepting only the "Funeral," I do not greatly admire. I miss one, which had at least as good a title to publication as the "Witch," or the "Sailor's Mother." You call'd it the "Last of the Family." The "Old Woman of Berkeley" comes next; in some humours I would give it the preference above any. But who the devil is Matthew of Westminster? You are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative of Matthew of Westminster. 'Tis surprising with how little addition you have been able to convert with so little alteration his incidents, meant for terror, into circumstances and food for the spleen. The Parody is not so successful; it has one famous line indeed, which conveys the finest death-bed image I ever met with:
"The doctor whisper'd the nurse, and the surgeon knew what he said."
But the offering the bride three times bears not the slightest analogy or proportion to the fiendish noises three times heard! In "Jaspar," the circumstance of the great light is very affecting. But I had heard you mention it before. The "Rose" is the only insipid piece in the volume; it hath neither thorns nor sweetness, and, besides, sets all chronology and probability at defiance.
"Cousin Margaret," you know, I like. The allusions to the "Pilgrim's Progress" are particularly happy, and harmonise tacitly and delicately with old cousins and aunts. To familiar faces we do associate familiar scenes and accustomed objects; but what hath Apollidon and his sea-nymphs to do in these affairs? Apollyon I could have borne, though he stands for the devil; but who is Apollidon? I think you are too apt to conclude faintly, with some cold moral, as in the end of the poem called "The Victory"--
"Be thou her comforter, who art the widow's friend;"
a single common-place line of comfort, which bears no proportion in weight or number to the many lines which describe suffering. This is to convert religion into mediocre feelings, which should burn, and glow, and tremble. A moral should be wrought into the body and soul, the matter and tendency, of a poem, not tagged to the end, like a "God send the good ship into harbour," at the conclusion of our bills of lading. The finishing of the "Sailor" is also imperfect. Any dissenting minister may say and do as much.
These remarks, I know, are crude and unwrought; but I do not lay claim to much accurate thinking. I never judge system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars. After all, there is a great deal in the book that I must, for time, leave unmentioned, to deserve my thanks for its own sake, as well as for the friendly remembrances implied in the gift. I again return you my thanks.
Pray present my love to Edith. C. L.
[Southey's little volume was Vol. II. of the second edition of his Poems, published in 1799. The last of the English Eclogues included in it was "The Ruined Cottage," slightly altered from the version referred to in letter 38. The "Hymn to the Penates" brought the first volume of this edition to a close. The first Eclogue was "The Old Mansion House." "The Old Woman of Berkeley" was called "A Ballad showing how an Old Woman rode double and who rode before her." It was preceded by a long quotation in Latin from Matthew of Westminster. Matthew of Westminster is the imaginary name given to the unknown authors of a chronicle called Flares Historiarum, belonging probably to the fifteenth century. The Parody was "The Surgeon's Warning," which begins with the two lines that Lamb prints as one:--
The Doctor whisper'd to the Nurse, And the Surgeon knew what he said.
"The Rose" was blank verse, addressed to Edith Southey. "Cousin Margaret" was a "Metrical Letter Written from London," in which there are allusions to Bunyan. The reference to Apollidon is explained by these lines:--
The Sylphs should waft us to some goodly isle, Like that where whilome old Apollidon Built up his blameless spell.]
45. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
March 2Oth, 1799.
I am hugely pleased with your "Spider," "your old freemason," as you call him. The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the ear; a terseness, a jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter. The measure, too, is novel and pleasing. I could almost wonder Rob. Burns in his lifetime never stumbled upon it. The fourth stanza is less striking, as being less original. The fifth falls off. It has no felicity of phrase, no old-fashioned phrase or feeling.
"Young hopes, and love's delightful dreams,"
savour neither of Burns nor Quarles; they seem more like shreds of many a modern sentimental sonnet. The last stanza hath nothing striking in it, if I except the two concluding lines, which are Burns all over. I wish, if you concur with me, these things could be looked to. I am sure this is a kind of writing, which comes tenfold better recommended to the heart, comes there more like a neighbour or familiar, than thousands of Hamuels and Zillahs and Madelons. I beg you will send me the "Holly-tree," if it at all resemble this, for it must please me. I have never seen it. I love this sort of poems, that open a new intercourse with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I think this vein may be further opened; Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge, less successfully, hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein only following at unresembling distance Sterne and greater Cervantes. Besides these, I know of no other examples of breaking down the partition between us and our "poor earth-born companions." It is sometimes revolting to be put in a track of feeling by other people, not one's own immediate thoughts, else I would persuade you, if I could (I am in earnest), to commence a series of these animal poems, which might have a tendency to rescue some poor creatures from the antipathy of mankind. Some thoughts come across me;--for instance--to a rat, to a toad, to a cockchafer, to a mole--People bake moles alive by a slow oven-fire to cure consumption. Rats are, indeed, the most despised and contemptible parts of God's earth. I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour. Toads you know are made to fly, and tumble down and crush all to pieces. Cockchafers are old sport; then again to a worm, with an apostrophe to anglers, those patient tyrants, meek inflictors of pangs intolerable, cool devils; to an owl; to all snakes, with an apology for their poison; to a cat in boots or bladders. Your own fancy, if it takes a fancy to these hints, will suggest many more. A series of such poems, suppose them accompanied with plates descriptive of animal torments, cooks roasting lobsters, fishmongers crimping skates, &c., &c., would take excessively. I will willingly enter into a partnership in the plan with you: I think my heart and soul would go with it too--at least, give it a thought. My plan is but this minute come into my head; but it strikes me instantaneously as something new, good and useful, full of pleasure and full of moral. If old Quarles and Wither could live again, we would invite them into our firm. Burns hath done his part. I the other day threw off an extempore epitaph on Ensign Peacock of the 3rd Regt. of the Royal East India Volunteers, who like other boys in this scarlet tainted age was ambitious of playing at soldiers, but dying in the first flash of his valour was at the particular instance of his relations buried with military honours! like any veteran scarr'd or chopt from Blenheim or Ramilies. (He was buried in sash and gorget.)
MARMOR LOQUITUR
He lies a Volunteer so fine, Who died of a decline, As you or I, may do one day; Reader, think of this, I pray; And I numbly hope you'll drop a tear For my poor Royal Volunteer. He was as brave as brave could be, Nobody was so brave as he; He would have died in Honor's bed, Only he died at home instead. Well may the Royal Regiment swear, They never had such a Volunteer. But whatsoever they may say, Death is a man that will have his way: Tho' he was but an ensign in this world of pain; In the next we hope he'll be a captain. And without meaning to make any reflection on his mentals, He begg'd to be buried in regimentals.
Sed hæ sunt lamentabilis nugæ--But 'tis as good as some epitaphs you and I have read together in Christ-Church-yard.
Poor Sam. Le Grice! I am afraid the world, and the camp, and the university, have spoilt him among them. 'Tis certain he had at one time a strong capacity of turning out something better. I knew him, and that not long since, when he had a most warm heart. I am ashamed of the indifference I have sometimes felt towards him. I think the devil is in one's heart. I am under obligations to that man for the warmest friendship and heartiest sympathy, even for an agony of sympathy exprest both by word and deed, and tears for me, when I was in my greatest distress. But I have forgot that! as, I fear, he has nigh forgot the awful scenes which were before his eyes when he served the office of a comforter to me. No service was too mean or troublesome for him to perform. I can't think what but the devil, "that old spider," could have suck'd my heart so dry of its sense of all gratitude. If he does come in your way, Southey, fail not to tell him that I retain a most affectionate remembrance of his old friendliness, and an earnest wish to resume our intercourse. In this I am serious. I cannot recommend him to your society, because I am afraid whether he be quite worthy of it. But I have no right to dismiss him from my regard. He was at one time, and in the worst of times, my own familiar friend, and great comfort to me then. I have known him to play at cards with my father, meal-times excepted, literally all day long, in long days too, to save me from being teased by the old man, when I was not able to bear it.
God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey.
C. L.
[Peter Pindar (Dr. John Wolcot) has an ode "To a Fly, taken out of a Bowl of Punch." He also wrote "The Lousiad."
"Poor earth-born companions." From Burns' "Lines to a Mouse," 2nd Stanza, line 5.
"Toads are made to fly." Filliping the toad was an old pastime. A toad was placed on one end of a piece of wood, laid crosswise over a stone. The other end was struck with a beetle (i.e., a mallet), and the toad flew into the air. Falstaff says: "Fillip me with a three-man beetle." As to worms and fishermen, the late Mrs. Coe, who as a girl had known Lamb at Widford, told me that he could rarely, if ever, be tempted to join the anglers. Affixing the worm was too much for him. "Barbarous, barbarous," he used to say.
Lamb's project for a series of animal poems has to some extent been carried out by a living poet, Mr. A. C. Benson. Neither Lamb nor Southey pursued it.
We met Sam Le Grice in the letter of October 3, 1796. To what escapade Lamb refers I do not know, but he was addicted to folly. It was Sam Le Grice of whom Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography tells the excellent tale that he excused himself to his master for not having performed a task, by the remark that he had had a "lethargy."
In April of this year died John Lamb, the father. Charles Lamb probably at once moved from 45 Chapel Street to No. 36, where Mary Lamb joined him.
Between this and the next letter should probably come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, not available for this edition. It seems to follow upon Robert Lloyd's departure from Lamb's house, and remarks that Lamb knows but one being that he could ever consent to live perpetually with, and that is Robert--but Robert must go whither prudence and paternal regulations dictate. Lamb also refers to a poem of an intimate character by Charles Lloyd in the Annual Anthology ("Lines to a Brother and Sister"), remarking that, in his opinion, these domestic addresses should not always be made public. There is also a reference to Charles Lloyd's novel, which Lamb says he wants to read if he may be permitted a sight of it. This would be Isabel.]
46. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Oct. 31st, 1799.
Dear Southey,--I have but just got your letter, being returned from Herts, where I have passed a few red-letter days with much pleasure. I would describe the county to you, as you have done by Devonshire, but alas! I am a poor pen at that same. I could tell you of an old house with a tapestry bed-room, the "judgment of Solomon" composing one pannel, and "Actæon spying Diana naked" the other. I could tell of an old marble hall, with Hogarth's prints and the Roman Caesars in marble hung round. I could tell of a wilderness, and of a village church, and where the bones of my honoured grandam lie; but there are feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will not be naturalised in another soil. Of this nature are old family faces and scenes of infancy.
I have given your address, and the books you want, to the Arches; they will send them as soon as they can get them, but they do not seem quite familiar to [? with] their names. I have seen Gebor! Gebor aptly so denominated from Geborish, quasi Gibberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals. I remember darkly one beautiful simile veiled in uncouth phrases about the youngest daughter of the Ark. I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the Anthology. You shall have some fragments of my play, if you desire them, but I think I would rather print it whole. Have you seen it, or shall I lend you a copy? I want your opinion of it.
I must get to business, so farewell. My kind remembrances to Edith.
C. LAMB.
[Lamb had probably been staying at Widford. Many years later he described his Hertfordshire days in more than one essay (see the Elia essays "Mackery End" and "Blakesmoor in H-----shire" and "Dream-Children"). The old house was, of course, Blakesware. The wilderness, which lay at the back of the house, is, with Widford, mentioned in Rosamund Gray.
The Arches were the brothers Arch, the booksellers of Ludgate Hill.
Gebor stands for Gebir, Landor's poem, published in 1798. The simile in question would be this: from Book VII., lines 248-251:--
Never so eager, when the world was waves, Stood the less daughter of the ark, and tried (Innocent this temptation) to recall With folded vest and casting arm the dove.
The reference to Southey's Anthology is to Vol. II., then in preparation. The play was now finished: it circulated in manuscript before being published in 1802.
In a letter to Robert Lloyd, dated December 17, 1799, Lamb thanks him for a present of porter, adding that wine makes him hot, and brandy drunk, but porter warms without intoxication.
Here should come an unpublished letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd at Cambridge, asking for the return of his play. Kemble, he says, had offered to put it in the hands of the proprietor of Drury Lane, and therefore Lamb wishes to have a second copy in the house. Kemble, as it turned out, returned no answer for a year, and then he stated that he had lost the copy.
Lamb mentions Coleridge's settlement with his family in lodgings in the Adelphi. Coleridge, having returned from Germany and undertaken work for the Morning Post, took lodgings at 21 Buckingham Street, Strand, close to the Adelphi, in November, 1799.
The letter is interesting in containing the first mention of Manning, whom we are now to meet.]
47. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
Dec., 1799.
Dear Manning,--The particular kindness, even up to a degree of attachment, which I have experienced from you, seems to claim some distinct acknowledgment on my part. I could not content myself with a bare remembrance to you, conveyed in some letter to Lloyd.
Will it be agreeable to you, if I occasionally recruit your memory of me, which must else soon fade, if you consider the brief intercourse we have had. I am not likely to prove a troublesome correspondent. My scribbling days are past. I shall have no sentiments to communicate, but as they spring up from some living and worthy occasion.
I look forward with great pleasure to the performance of your promise, that we should meet in London early in the ensuing year. The century must needs commence auspiciously for me, that brings with it Manning's friendship as an earnest of its after gifts.
I should have written before, but for a troublesome inflammation in one of my eyes, brought on by night travelling with the coach windows sometimes up.
What more I have to say shall be reserved for a letter to Lloyd. I must not prove tedious to you in my first outset, lest I should affright you by my ill-judged loquacity. I am, yours most sincerely, C. LAMB.
[This is the first letter that has been preserved in the correspondence between Lamb and Manning. Lamb first met Manning at Cambridge, in the autumn of 1799, when on a visit to Charles Lloyd. Much of Manning's history will be unfolded as the letters proceed, but here it should be stated that he was born on November 8, 1772, and was thus a little more than two years older than Lamb. He was at this time acting as private tutor in mathematics at Cambridge, among his pupils being Charles Lloyd, of Caius, Manning's own college. Manning, however, did not take his degree, owing to an objection to oaths and tests.
Lamb's reference to the beginning of the century shows that he shared with many other non-mathematically-minded persons the belief that the century begins with the hundredth, and not the hundred and first, year. He says of Manning, in the Elia essay "The Old and the New Schoolmaster": "My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second."]
48. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
Dec. 28th, 1799.
Dear Manning,--Having suspended my correspondence a decent interval, as knowing that even good things may be taken to satiety, a wish cannot but recur to learn whether you be still well and happy. Do all things continue in the state I left them in Cambridge?
Do your night parties still flourish? and do you continue to bewilder your company with your thousand faces running down through all the keys of idiotism (like Lloyd over his perpetual harpsicord), from the smile and the glimmer of half-sense and quarter-sense to the grin and hanging lip of Betty Foy's own Johnny? And does the face-dissolving curfew sound at twelve? How unlike the great originals were your petty terrors in the postscript, not fearful enough to make a fairy shudder, or a Lilliputian fine lady, eight months full of child, miscarry. Yet one of them, which had more beast than the rest, I thought faintly resembled one of your brutifications. But, seriously, I long to see your own honest Manning-face again. I did not mean a pun,--your man's face, you will be apt to say, I know your wicked will to pun. I cannot now write to Lloyd and you too, so you must convey as much interesting intelligence as this may contain, or be thought to contain, to him and Sophia, with my dearest love and remembrances.
By the by, I think you and Sophia both incorrect with regard to the title of the play. Allowing your objection (which is not necessary, as pride may be, and is in real life often, cured by misfortunes not directly originating from its own acts, as Jeremy Taylor will tell you a naughty desire is sometimes sent to cure it--I know you read these practical divines). But allowing your objection, does not the betraying of his father's secret directly spring from pride?--from the pride of wine and a full heart, and a proud over-stepping of the ordinary rules of morality, and contempt of the prejudices of mankind, which are not to bind superior souls--"as trust in the matter of secret all ties of blood, &c., &c., keeping of promises, the feeble mind's religion, binding our morning knowledge to the performance of what last night's ignorance spake"--does he not prate, that "Great Spirits" must do more than die for their friend--does not the pride of wine incite him to display some evidence of friendship, which its own irregularity shall make great? This I know, that I meant his punishment not alone to be a cure for his daily and habitual pride, but the direct consequence and appropriate punishment of a particular act of pride.
If you do not understand it so, it is my fault in not explaining my meaning.
I have not seen Coleridge since, and scarcely expect to see him,--perhaps he has been at Cambridge. I dined with him in town and breakfasted with him and Priscilla, who you may tell Charles has promised to come and see me when she returns [to] Clapham. I will write to Charles on Monday.
Need I turn over to blot a fresh clean half-sheet? merely to say, what I hope you are sure of without my repeating it, that I would have you consider me, dear Manning, Your sincere friend,
C. LAMB.
What is your proper address?
["Betty Foy's own Johnny"--"The Idiot Boy," in the Lyrical Ballads.
"In the postscript." A reference presumably to some drawings of faces in one of Manning's letters.
"The title of the play." Writing to Lamb on December 15, 1799, Manning had said: "I had some conversation the other day with Sophia concerning your tragedy; and she made some very sensible observations (as I thought) with respect to the unfitness of its title, 'The Folly,' whose consequences humble the pride and ambition of John's heart, does not originate in the workings of those passions, but from an underpart in his character, and as it were accidentally, viz., from the ebullitions of a drunken mind and from a rash confidence."
"You will understand what I mean, without my explaining myself any further. God bless you, and keep you from all evil things, that walk upon the face of the earth--I mean nightmares, hobgoblins and spectres."
Lamb refers in this letter particularly to Act III. of his play. "I have not seen Coleridge since." Since when is not clear. Possibly Coleridge had been at Cambridge when Lamb was there.]
Letter 49
CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE ? Jan. 23, 1800.
Dear Coleridge,--Now I write, I cannot miss this opportunity of acknowledging the obligations myself, and the readers in general of that luminous paper, the "Morning Post," are under to you for the very novel and exquisite manner in which you combined political with grammatical science, in your yesterday's dissertation on Mr. Wyndham's unhappy composition. It must have been the death-blow to that ministry. I expect Pitt and Grenville to resign. More especially the delicate and Cottrellian grace with which you officiated, with a ferula for a white wand, as gentleman usher to the word "also," which it seems did not know its place.
I expect Manning of Cambridge in town to-night--will you fulfil your promise of meeting him at my house? He is a man of a thousand. Give me a line to say what day, whether Saturday, Sunday, Monday, &c., and if Sara and the Philosopher can come. I am afraid if I did not at intervals call upon you, I should never see you. But I forget, the affairs of the nation engross your time and your mind.
Farewell. C.L.
[The first letter that has been preserved of the second period of Lamb's correspondence with Coleridge, which was to last until the end.
In the Morning Post of January 7, 1800, had appeared the correspondence between Buonaparte and Lord Grenville, in which Buonaparte made an offer of peace. Lord Grenville's Note, it was pointed out in the Morning Post for January 16, was really written by William Windham, Secretary for War, and on January 22 appeared an article closely criticising its grammar.
Here is the passage concerning "also," to which Lamb particularly alludes a little later in the letter:--
... "The same system, to the prevalence of which France justly ascribes all her present miseries, is that which has also involved the rest of Europe in a long and destructive warfare, of a nature long since unknown to the practice of civilized nations." Here the connective word "also" should have followed the word "Europe." As it at present stands, the sentence implies that France, miserable as she may be, has, however, not been involved in a warfare. The word "same" is absolutely expletive; and by appearing to refer the reader to some foregoing clause, it not only loads the sentence, but renders it obscure. The word "to" is absurdly used for the word "in." A thing may be unknown to practitioners, as humanity and sincerity may be unknown to the practitioners of State-craft, and foresight, science, and harmony may have been unknown to the planners and practitioners of Continental Expeditions; but even "cheese-parings and candle-ends" cannot be known or unknown "to" a practice!!
Windham was destined to be attacked by another stalwart in Lamb's circle, for it was his speech in opposition to Lord Erskine's Cruelty to Animals Bill in 1809 that inspired John Lamb to write his fierce pamphlet (see page 434).
"Cottrellian grace." The Cotterells were Masters of the Ceremonies from 1641 to 1808.
The Philosopher was Hartley Coleridge, aged three, so called after his great namesake, David Hartley. The Coleridges were now, as we have seen, living at 21 Buckingham Street, Strand.]