The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 297 : Monday Night.["Little drawer where I keep ..." Lamb soon lost the habit of k

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 partners.h.i.+p, 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 t.i.tle, "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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage, 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

[Sat.u.r.day,] 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 n.o.body, 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.

G.o.d love you and yours. C. L.

Sat.u.r.day.

[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.]

LETTER 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!