1815 VINNY BOURNE 457 you give 'em an inch &c. The preface is noble 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 door-keeper 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 knowlege, the four yew trees and the mysterious company which you have assembled 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 without naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. He gave a few shillings 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 comes 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 balad 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 thro' a volume of fine words by La. Thurlow-excellent words, and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regale-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 Elisabeth poets; from thence I turned to V. Bourne-what a sweet unpretending pretty-mannered matter-ful creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of every thing, his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English. 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 all together. Besides they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiousity. 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. The one of the wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapt 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 10 in the morning (two hours dinner except) to 11 at night, last night till 9. My business and office business in general has increased so. I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till 4-and do not keep a holyday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red letter days, and some fine days besides which I used to dub Nature's holydays. 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 taints even the leisure hours, stains Sunday with workday contemplations—this is Sunday, and the headache I have is part late hours at work the 2 preceding nights and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwds. 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 To such straits am I driven for the Life of life, Time-O that from that superfluity of Holyday leisure my youth wasted "Age might but take some hours youth wanted not.—” N.B. I have left off spirituous liquors for 4 or more months, with a moral certainty of its lasting. Farewell, dear Wordsworth. NOTE [Wordsworth had just brought out, with Longmans, his Poems including Lyrical Ballads and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author, 1815, in two volumes. The "Character in the Antithetical Manner was omitted from all editions of Wordsworth's poems between 1800 and 1836. In the 1800 version of "Rural Architecture" there had been these last lines, expunged 1815 WORDSWORTH'S 1815 VOLUMES 459 in the editions of 1805 and 1815, but restored with a slight alteration in later editions :— -Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works In Paris and London, 'mong Christians or Turks, At remembrance whereof my blood sometimes will flag, In the original form of the "Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree" there had been these lines : His only visitants a straggling sheep, Wordsworth had altered them to : His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless Bird, In the 1820 edition Wordsworth put back the original form. "That substitution of a shell." In the original draft of "The Blind Highland Boy" the adventurous voyage was made in A Household Tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes. In the new version the vessel was a turtle's shell. "The preface." Wordsworth quotes from Lamb's essay in The Reflector on the genius of Hogarth, referring to the passage as "the language of one of my most esteemed Friends." It is Lamb's description of Imagination as that which "draws all things to one, which makes things animate or inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects with their accessories, take one colour and serve to one effect." "The four yew trees." The poem is called " Yew Trees." This is the passage in question: But worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope, As in a natural temple scattered o'er To lie, and listen to the mountain flood "Picture of Milton." This portrait, a reproduction of which I give on the opposite page, is now in America, the property of the New York Public Library, by whose permission the reproduction has been made. "V. Bourne." Lamb afterwards translated some of Bourne's Poemata and wrote critically of them in the Englishman's Magazine in 1831 (see Vol. V., page 61, and Vol. I., page 337). "Lord Thurlow." But see Letter No. 445 and note. "Extracts from those first Poems." Wordsworth included extracts from juvenile pieces, which had been first published in his Descriptive Sketches, 1793. "A female friend "-Dorothy Wordsworth. The three poems were "Address to a Child" (beginning, "What way does the Wind come from?"), "The Mother's Return" and "The Cottager to Her Infant." "To them each evening had its glittering star "The Excursion, Book V. 66 'Age might but take some hours . . From Wordsworth's "Small Celandine": Age might but take the things Youth needed not.] LETTER 207 CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. April 28, 1815.] Excuse this maddish letter: I am too tired to write in formâ DEA EAR Wordswth. The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgmts 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 |