To them each evening had its glittering star,
And every sabbath-day its golden sun'-

late hours at work the two preceding nights, | voluntary pen-work) I lost all presential and part later hours over a consoling pipe memory of what I had intended to say, and afterwards. But I find stupid acquiescence say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne, coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and it or any casual image, instead of that which I is almost with me and my household as with had meditated, (by the way, I must look out the man and his consort. V. B. for you). So I had meant to have mentioned Yarrow Visited,' with that stanza, But thou, that didst appear so fair;'* than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry; —yet the poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but one exquisite verse in it, the last but one, or the two last-this has all fine, except, perhaps, that that of 'studious ease and generous cares,' has a little, tinge of the less romantic about it. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale' is a charming counterpart to 'Poor Susan,' with the addition of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path, which is so fine in the Old Thief and the Boy by his side,' which always brings water into my eyes. Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition; Susan' stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe. There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten; bright volumes of vapour,' &c. The last verse of Susan was

to such straits am I driven for the life of
life, Time! O that from that superfluity of
holiday-leisure my youth wasted, 'Age might
but take some hours youth wanted not.'
N. B. — I have left off spirituous liquors for
four or more months, with a moral certainty
of its lasting.* Farewell, dear Wordsworth!
"O happy Paris, seat of idleness and
pleasure! from some returned English I
hear, that not such a thing as a counting-
house is to be seen in her streets,
desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercan-
tile city and its gripple merchants,' as
Drayton hath it-born to be the curse of
this brave isle!' I invoke this, not on
account of any parsimonious habits the
mercantile interest may have, but, to confess
truth, because I am not fit for an office.

-scarce a

"Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodise, a stomach to digest, and all out of tune. Better harmonies await you! C. LAMB."

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"Excuse this maddish letter; 1 am too to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a tired to write in formâ;

"1815.

"Dear Wordsworth, — The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgments for them in more than one short letter. The Night Piece,' to which you refer me, I meant fully to have noticed; but, the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down to scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me I mean

*Alas! for moral certainty in this moral but mortal

kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away; but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that ending to the Boy-builders is a mystery. I can't say positively now, — I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that

world! Lamb's resolution to leave off spirituous liquors Light-hearted boys, I will build up a Giant

was a brave one; but he strengthened and rewarded it by such copious libations of porter, that his sister, for whose sake mainly he attempted the sacrifice, entreated him to "live like himself," and in a few weeks after this assurance he obeyed her.

"But thou, that didst appear so fair

To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the ligh. of day
Her delicate creation."

It state.

with you.' It comes naturally, with a warm | I cannot endure my own writings in that holiday, and the freshness of the blood. is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a maying. N. B.-I don't often go out a maying;-Must is the tense with me now. Do you take the pun? Young Romilly is divine; the reasons of his mother's grief being remediless I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves - Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too, in Lear's resentment: he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart. I get stupid, and flat, and flattering; what's the use of telling you what good things you have written, or — I hope I may add that I know them to be good? Apropos when I first opened upon the justmentioned poem, in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, 'What is good for a bootless bene? To which, with infinite presence of mind, (as the jest-book has it,) she answered, 'a shoeless pea.' It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the Man in the Strand,' and that from The Babes in the Wood.' I was thinking, whether taking your own glorious lines

The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is Peter Bell. But I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it Who was in knowing what good verse was. looked over your proof-sheets, and left ordebo in that line of Virgil?

'And from the love which was in her soul
For her youthful Romilly,'

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I
think have no parallel in any of the best old
ballads, and just altering it to

'And from the great respect she felt

For Sir Samuel Romilly,'

would not have explained the boundaries of prose expression, and poetic feeling, nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that White Doe' you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when drest, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis,

The admirable little poem, entitled "The Force of Prayer," developing the depths of a widowed mother's grief, whose only son has been drowned in attempting 10 leap over the precipice of the "Wharf," at Bolton

It is the

"My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted, that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze Yet though I for the half-hour at a time.

am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not; it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first. I think it was page 245; but I sent it, and had it rectified. It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning, and suddenly reading No thoroughfare.' Robinson's is entire. I wish you would write more criticism about Spenser, &c. I think I could bless me! these 'merchants and their spicy say something about him myself, but, Lord

Abbey. The first line. printed in old English characters, from some old English ballad,

"What is good for a bootless bene?" suggests Miss Lamb's single pun, The following are the profoundest stanzas among those which excite her brother's most just admiration:

"If for a lover the lady wept,

A solace she might borrow

From death and from the passion of death;-
Old Wharf might heal her sorrow.
"She weeps not for the wedding-day,
Which was to be to-morrow:
Her hope was a further-looking hope,
And hers is a mother's sorrow."

drugs,' which are so harmonious to sing of, his fugitive poems, the former his Literary

they lime-twig up my poor soul and body
till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit
of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts
on paper for a newspaper. I'engross' when
I should 'pen' a paragraph. Confusion blast
all mercantile transactions, all traffic, ex-
change of commodities, intercourse between
nations, all the consequent civilization, and
wealth, and amity, and link of society, and
getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of
the face of the globe; and rot the very firs
of the forest, that look so romantic alive, and
die into desks! Vale.

"Yours, dear W., and all yours,
"C. LAMB."

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"April 9th, 1816.

"Dear Wordsworth, - Thanks for the books you have given me, and for all the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For, of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my moneyborrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money, they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Covent Garden Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy, though (having read it,) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, though it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O'Neil or a Mr. Kean. However, he is going to-day to write to Lord Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter, which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate, till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing

Life. Nature, who conducts every creature, by instinct, to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chymist's Laboratory in Norfolk-street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls! He has done pretty well as yet.

"Tell Miss H., my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; God bless him!

*

"Tell Mrs. W., her postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible, too. Your manual-graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron. 'Likelihood,' for instance, is thus typified: I should not wonder if the constant making out of such paragraphs is the cause of that weakness in Mrs. W.'s eyes, as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you, and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to im press, in corresponding lucidness, upon our outward eye-sight!

"Mary's love to all. She is quite well.

"I am called off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool—but why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and contingent fund? Adieu!

"Acountant's Office, 26th April, 1816.*

better than Windsor Forest,' ' Dying Chris-
tian's Address,' &c. Coleridge has sent his
tragedy to D. L. T.; it cannot be acted this
season, and by their manner of receiving, I
hope he will be able to alter it to make them
accept it for next. He is, at present, under
the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman ?)
at Highgate, where he plays at leaving off
laud-m; I think his essentials not touched;
he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks
up another day, and his face, when he repeats
his verses, hath its ancient glory; an arch-
angel a little damaged. Will Miss H.
pardon our not replying at length to her
kind letter? We are not quiet enough;
Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt
Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is
absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood
of such a man is as exciting as the presence
of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be
within the whiff and wind of his genius for
us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I
lived with him or the Author of the Excursion,
I should, in a very little time, lose my own
identity, and be dragged along in the current
of other people's thoughts, hampered in a
net. How cool I sit in this office, with no
possible interruption further than what I
may term material! There is not as much
metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here
as there is in the first page of Locke's
Treatise on the Human Understanding,'
or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the
'Pleasures of Hope,' or more natural 'Beg-
gar's Petition.' I never entangle myself in
any of their speculations. Interruptions, if
I try to write a letter even, I have dreadful.
Just now, within four lines, I was called off
for ten minutes to consult dusty old books
for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold
you a guinea you don't find the chasm where
I left off, so excellently the wounded sense
closed again and was healed.

"Dear W., I have just finished the
pleasing task of correcting the revise of the
poems and letter. I hope they will come
out faultless. One blunder I SAW and
shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had
printed battered for battened, this last not
conveying any distinct sense to his gaping
soul. The reader (as they call 'em) had dis-
covered it, and given it the marginal brand,
but the substitutory n had not yet appeared.
I accompanied his notice with a most pathetic
address to the printer not to neglect the cor-
rection. I know how such a blunder would
'batter at your peace.' With regard to the
works, the Letter I read with unabated
satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted;
called for. The parallel of Cotton with
Burns I heartily approve. Iz. Walton hal-
lows any page in which his reverend name
appears. Duty archly bending to purposes
of general benevolence' is exquisite. The
poems I endeavoured not to understand, but
to read them with my eye alone, and I think
I succeeded. (Some people will do that
when they come out, you'll say.) As if I
were to luxuriate to-morrow at some picture-
gallery I was never at before, and going by
to-day by chance, found the door open, and
having but five minutes to look about me,
peeped in; just such a chastised peep I took
with my mind at the lines my luxuriating
eye was coursing over unrestrained, not to
anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction.
Coleridge is printing 'Christabel,' by Lord
Byron's recommendation to Murray, with
what he calls a vision, 'Kubla Khan,' which
said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it
irradiates and brings heaven and elysian
bowers into my parlour while he sings or
says it; but there is an observation, 'Never
tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that
Kubla Khan' is an owl that won't bear
day-light. I fear lest it should be discovered "N. B.-Nothing said above to the con-
by the lantern of typography and clear re- trary, but that I hold the personal presence
ducting to letters no better than nonsense of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate
or no sense. When I was young. I used to as high as any; but I pay dearer; what
chant with ecstacy MILD ARCAPIANS EVER amuses others robs me of myself; my mind
BLOOMING,' till somebody told me it was is positively discharged into their greater
meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a currents, but flows with a willing violence.
lingering attachment to it, and I think it As to your question about work; it is far
* This is shown by the postmark to be an error; it should less oppressive to me than it was, from cir
cumstances; it takes all the golden part of

be 1818.

the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; matters, but in a judicious and steady superbut it does not kill my peace as before. Some intendence of the whole; with a wise allowday or other I shall be in a taking again. My ance of the occasional excesses of wit and head aches, and you have had enough. God genius. In this respect, Mr. Scott differed bless you! C. LAMB." entirely from a celebrated poet, who was induced, just a year after, to undertake the Editorship of the "New Monthly Magazine," an office for which, it may be said, with all veneration for his poetic genius, he was the most unfit person who could be found in the wide world of letters — who regarded a magazine as if it were a long affidavit, or a short answer in Chancery, in which the absolute

TRIBUTORS MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF LAMB truth of every sentiment and the propriety of