1797 CHARLES LLOYD AGAIN 103 Poor dear Lloyd! I had a letter from him yesterday; his state of mind is truly alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine unopened three weeks, afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him; and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one, wherein he informed me that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing. You will pray with me, I know, for his recovery; for surely, Coleridge, an exquisiteness of feeling like this must border on derangement. But I love him more and more, and will not give up the hope of his speedy recovery, as he tells me he is under Dr. Darwin's regimen. God bless us all, and shield us from insanity, which is “the sorest malady of all." My kind love to your wife and child. C. LAMB. Pray write, now. NOTE [I have placed the poem at the head from the text of Coleridge's Poems, 1797, where it was relegated to the Appendix; but the version of the letter very likely differed (see next letter for at least one alteration). Fairfax's Godfrey of Bullen was his translation of Tasso, which is mentioned on page 93. Lloyd, who was undergoing one of those attacks of acute melancholia to which he was subject all his life, had been sent to Lichfield, where Erasmus Darwin had established a sanatorium. "The sorest malady of all." From Lamb's lines to Cowper (see page 37).] LETTER 26 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Tuesday,] June 13th, 1797. I STARED with wild wonderment to see thy well-known hand again. It revived many a pleasing recollection of an epistolary intercourse, of late strangely suspended, once the pride of my life. Before I even opened thy letter, I figured to myself a sort of complacency which my little hoard at home would feel at receiving the new-comer into the little drawer where I keep my treasures of this kind. You have done well in writing to me. The little room (was it not a little one?) at the Salutation was already in the way of becoming a fading idea! it had begun to be classed in my memory with those "wanderings with a fair hair'd maid,” in the recollection of which I feel I have no property. You press me, very kindly do you press me, to come to Stowey; obstacles, strong as death, prevent me at present; maybe I shall be able to come before the year is out; believe me, I will come as soon as I can, but I dread naming a probable time. It depends on fifty things, besides the expense, which is not nothing. Lloyd wants me to come and see him; but, besides that you have a prior claim on me, I should not feel myself so much at home with him, till he gets a house of his own. As to Richardson, caprice may grant what caprice only refused, and it is no more hardship, rightly considered, to be dependent on him for pleasure, than to lie at the mercy of the rain and sunshine for the enjoyment of a holiday: in either case we are not to look for a suspension of the laws of nature. "Grill will be Grill." Vide Spenser. I could not but smile at the compromise you make with me for printing Lloyd's poems first; but there is [are] in nature, I fear, too many tendencies to envy and jealousy not to justify you in your apology. Yet, if any one is welcome to pre-eminence from me, it is Lloyd, for he would be the last to desire it. So pray, let his name uniformly precede mine, for it would be treating me like a child to suppose it could give me pain. Yet, alas! I am not insusceptible of the bad passions. Thank God, I have the ingenuousness to be ashamed of them. I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd; he is all goodness, and I have too much of the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his friendship. Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakspeare was a more modest man; but you best know your own power. Of my last poem you speak slightingly; surely the longer stanzas were pretty tolerable; at least there was one good line in it, "Thick-shaded trees, with dark green leaf rich clad." To adopt your own expression, I call this a "rich" line, a fine full line. And some others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, my little gentleman will feel some repugnance at riding behind in the basket; though, I confess, in pretty good company. Your picture of idiocy, with the sugar-loaf head, is exquisite; but are you not too severe upon our more favoured brethren in fatuity? Lloyd tells me how ill your wife and child have been. I rejoice that they are better. My kindest remembrances and those of my sister. I send you a trifling letter; but you have only to think 1797 COLERIDGE'S "OSORIO " 105 that I have been skimming the superficies of my mind, and found it only froth. Now, do write again; you cannot believe how I long and love always to hear about you. Yours, most affectionately, CHARLES LAMB. ["Little drawer where I keep · of keeping any letters, except Manning's. Lamb soon lost the habit "Wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid." Lamb's own line. sonnet quoted on page 24. See 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 partnership, 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.". 66 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 title, "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 passed a poor ideot boy, who exactly answered my description; he 'Stood in the sun, rocking his sugar-loaf head, See this passage, much altered, in "Remorse," II., 1, 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 [Saturday,] June 24th, 1797. ID 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 nobody, 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. God love you and yours. Saturday. C. L. NOTE [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. 1797 NETHER STOWEY IN VIEW 107 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 on page 3. "What I have owed to thee. These words are a quota tion-the last line of Bowles' sonnet "Oxford Revisited."] 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. NOTE ["Our little book." Coleridge's Poems, second edition. |