The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 16

_August_ 14, 1814.

Dear Wordsworth,--I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me: and to get it before the rest of the world, too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you; but Martin Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it: but we expect rest.i.tution in a day or two. It is the n.o.blest conversational poem [1] I ever read,--a day in heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odor on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the "Tales of the Churchyard"--the only girl among seven brethren, born out of due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude,--these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I saw you first at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled setting. But neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophets saw them in that sunset,--the wheel, the potter's clay, the washpot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the baskets of figs, the four-fold-visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon.

One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognized so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day's pleasure,--the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country,--exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am feeling that which I cannot express. The reading your lines about it fixed me for a time a monument in Harrow Church,--do you know it?--with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.

I shall select a day or two very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more; for it will be a stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of n.o.ble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner, or south-countryman entirely,--though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark, during reading it, that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.

Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and a day or two on the banks of the Thames this summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the wise provision of the Regent all that was countrified in the parks is all but obliterated. The very colour of green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry, crumbling sand (_Arabia Arenosa_), not a vestige or hint of gra.s.s ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,--I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, _bad_ tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2]. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets; but in vain. The _vis unita_ of all the publicans in London, Westminster, Marylebone, and miles round, is too powerful a force to put down. The Regent has raised a phantom which he cannot lay. There they'll stay probably forever. The whole beauty of the place is gone,--that lake-look of the Serpentine (it has got foolish s.h.i.+ps upon it); but something whispers to have confidence in Nature and its revival,--

"At the coming of the _milder_ day, These monuments shall all be overgrown."

Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious pipe in one of the cleanliest and goodliest of the booths,--a tent rather,--

"Oh, call it not a booth!"

erected by the public spirit of Watson, who keeps the "Adam and Eve" at Pancras (the ale-houses have all emigrated, with their train of bottles, mugs, cork-screws, waiters, into Hyde Park,--whole ale-houses, with all their ale!) in company with some of the Guards that had been in France, and a fine French girl, habited like a princess of banditti, which one of the dogs had transported from the Garonne to the Serpentine. The unusual scene in Hyde Park, by candle-light, in open air,--good tobacco, bottled stout,--made it look like an interval in a campaign, a repose after battle. I almost fancied scars smarting, and was ready to club a story with my comrades of some of my lying deeds. After all, the fireworks were splendid; the rockets in cl.u.s.ters, in trees, and all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making, floundering about in s.p.a.ce (like unbroke horses), till some of Newton's calculations should fix them; but then they went out. Any one who could see 'em, and the still finer showers of gloomy rain-fire that fell sulkily and angrily from 'em, and could go to bed without dreaming of the last day, must be as hardened an atheist as--.

The conclusion of this epistle getting gloomy, I have chosen this part to desire _our_ kindest loves to Mrs. Wordsworth and to Dorothea. Will none of you ever be in London again?

Again let me thank you for your present, and a.s.sure you that fireworks and triumphs have not distracted me from receiving a calm and n.o.ble enjoyment from it (which I trust I shall often), and I sincerely congratulate you on its appearance.

With kindest remembrances to you and household, we remain, yours sincerely,

C. LAMB and Sister.

[1] The Excursion.

[2] Early in 1814 the London parks were thrown open to the public, with fireworks, booths, illuminations, etc., in celebration of the peace between France and England, it was two or three years before they recovered their usual verdure.

LIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

(1815)

Dear Wordsworth,--You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. [1] I have been carefully through the two volumes to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a character in the ant.i.thetic manner, which I do not know why you left out,--the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it, in my mind, less complete,--and one admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), "the stone-chat, and the glancing sandpiper," which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand. I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stripped shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that subst.i.tution of a sh.e.l.l (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the alteration for the "friendly reader;"

but the "malicious" will take it to himself. d.a.m.n 'em! if you give 'em an inch, etc. The Preface is n.o.ble, and such as you should write. I wish I could set my name to it, _Imprimatur_; but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you. I had rather be a doorkeeper in your margin than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I hardly received them as novelties. Of those of which I had no previous knowledge, the "Four Yew-Trees" and the mysterious company which you have a.s.sembled there most struck me,--"Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow." It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for years for, "Laodamia" is a very original poem,--I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it, I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.

Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture-collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. [2] He gave a few s.h.i.+llings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady had had it for a great many years. Its age is ascertainable from the state of the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the heads in the Tonson editions, with which we are all so well familiar. Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way which conies not every day,--the Latin poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes!--a proper counterpoise to _some people's_ rural extravaganzas. Why I mention him is, that your "Power of Music" reminded me of his poem of "The Ballad-singer in the Seven Dials," Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A B C, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's "Principia"? I was lately fatiguing myself with going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow,--excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales. But what an aching vacuum of matter!

I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, _matter-ful_ creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all Englis.h.!.+ Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why wasn't he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?

I am almost sorry that you printed extracts from those first poems, or that you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do altogether. Besides, they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind, as referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece they might have been written in the same week; these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been reading. We were glad to see the poems "by a female friend." [3] The one on the Wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapped a D. at the corner, and let it have past as a printer's mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better instructed. As it is, expect a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it. I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be. On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner excepted) to eleven at night, last night till nine; my business and office business in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days, and some few days besides, which I used to dub Nature's holidays.

I have had my day. I had formerly little to do. So of the little that is left of life I may reckon two thirds as dead, for time that a man may call his own is his life; and hard work and thinking about it taint even the leisure hours,--stain Sunday with work-day contemplations. This is Sunday; and the headache I have is part late hours at work the two preceding nights, and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwards.

But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort,--

"To them each evening had its glittering star, And every sabbath-day its golden sun!" [4]

to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time!

Oh 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,--scarce a desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile 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.

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

C. LAMB.

[1] In 1815 Wordsworth published a new edition of his poems, with the following t.i.tle: "Poems by William Wordsworth; including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional Poems, a new Preface, and a Supplementary Essay. In two Volumes." The new poems were "Yarrow Visited," "The Force of Prayer," "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," "Laodamia," "Yew-Trees," "A Night Piece," etc., and it was chiefly on these that Lamb made his comments.

[2] John Lamb afterwards gave the picture to Charles, who made it a wedding present to Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola), It is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

[3] Dorothy Wordsworth.

[4] Excursion, book v.

LV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write _in forma_.

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 and scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me,--I mean voluntary pen-work), I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated (by the way, I mast look out V. B. for you). So I had meant to have mentioned "Yarrow Visited," with that stanza, "But thou that didst appear so fair:" [1] 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 last two: this is 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 repet.i.tion; "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 vapor," etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a 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 [2] is a mystery. I can't say positively now, I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that "Light-hearted boys, I will build up a Giant with you." It comes naturally with a warm holiday and the freshness of the blood. It 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? _A propos_, when I first opened upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, "What is good for a bootless bene?" [3] 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,--

"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 nave 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 _dressed_, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare _magna parvis_, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. 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 was in knowing what good verse was. Who looked over your proof-sheets and left _ordebo_ in that line of Virgil?

My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted,--that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vand.y.k.e's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of _pet.i.t_ (or _pet.i.te_, 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 Spencer, etc. I think I could say something about him myself; but, Lord bless me! these "merchants and their spicy drugs," which are so harmonious to sing of, 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, exchange 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.