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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 some time since expressed 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 noways 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 rejoice, 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! 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.

XX.

TO THE SAME

January 16, 1797.

Dear C You have learned 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, and what (if you do not object to them as too personal, and 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 volume 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 addressed you in nothing which can appear in our joint volume; so frequently, so habitually, as you dwell in 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, and 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 Monthly Magazine, where they may possibly appear next month, and where I hope to recognise your poem on Burns.

TO AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

ALONE, obscure, without a friend,
A cheerless, solitary thing,
Why seeks my LLOYD the stranger out?
What off'ring can the stranger bring?

Of social scenes, home-bred delights,
That him in aught compensate may
For Stowey's pleasant winter nights,
For loves and 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 unaccustomed cheek,
And, with an o'ercharg'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 cherish'd be ;

I'll think less meanly of myself,

That LLOYD will sometimes think on me.

O Coleridge, 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 and Mouth; the Cat and Salutation would have had a charm more

forcible for me. O noctes cœnæque Deum! AngliceWelsh rabbit, punch, and poesy. Should you be induced to publish those very schoolboy-ish verses, print 'em as they will occur, if at all, in the Monthly Magazine; yet I should feel ashamed that to you I wrote nothing better: but they are too personal, and almost trifling and obscure withal. Some lines of mine to Cowper were in the last Monthly Magazine ; they have not body of thought enough to plead for the retaining of 'em. My sister's kind love to you all. Ć. LAMB.

XXI.

TO THE SAME

February 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 cheerless 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 and terrible benevolence" of Southey; added to this, that it will look like rivalship in you, and extort a comparison with Southey, I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, considered 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, and walked and talked 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 woful 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 and 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)!

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In these delineations of common and 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."

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