The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 3

The 4th Epistle is that to Joseph Cottle, Coleridge's publisher and the author of the "Monody on Henderson," referred to in Coleridge's verses.

The lines which Lamb quotes are Cottle's. The poem by Sara Coleridge is "The Silver Thimble." The pa.s.sage in the "Religious Musings," for which Lamb is thankful as a "child of fancy," is the last paragraph:--

Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er With untired gaze the immeasurable fount Ebullient with creative Deity!

And ye of plastic power, that interfused Roll through the grosser and material ma.s.s In organising surge! Holies of G.o.d!

(And what if Monads of the infinite mind?) I haply journeying my immortal course Shall sometime join your mystic choir!

Till then I discipline my young noviciate thought In ministeries of heart-stirring song, And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love, Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul As the great Sun, when he his influence Sheds on the frost-bound waters--The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.

"You came to Town ..." Soon after his engagement with Sara Fricker, his heart being still not wholly healed of its pa.s.sion for Mary Evans, Coleridge had gone to London from Bristol, nominally to arrange for the publication of his _Fall of Robespierre_, and had resumed intercourse with Lamb and other old Christ's Hospital friends. There he remained until Southey forcibly took him back in January, 1795. From what Lamb says of the loss of two friends we must suppose, in default of other information, that he had to give up his Anna at the same time. The loss of reason, however, to which he refers did not come until the end of the year 1795.

The 19th Effusion, afterwards called "On a Discovery Made Too Late;" the 28th, "The Kiss;" the 29th, "Imitated from Ossian."

"Your monody." This, not to be confounded with Cottle's "Monody on Henderson," was Coleridge's "Monody on Chatterton." Lamb's emendations were not accepted. As regards "The Man of Ross," the couplet beginning "Friend to the friendless" ultimately had a place both in that poem and in the Monody, but the couplet "and o'er the dowried virgin" was never replaced in either. The lines on spring, page 28, are "Lines to a Beautiful Spring." Dr. Forster (Faustus) was the hero of the nursery rhyme, whose scholars danced out of England into France and Spain and back again. The epitaph on an infant was in _The Watchman_, No. IX. (see note on page 62). The poem "Edmund" is called "Lines on a Friend who died of a frenzy fever induced by calumnious reports." The lines in "Absence" are those in the second stanza of the poem. They run thus:--

Ah fair Delights! that o'er my soul On Memory's wing, like shadows fly!

Ah Flowers! which Joy from Eden stole While Innocence stood smiling by!-- But cease, fond Heart! this bootless moan: Those Hours on rapid Pinions flown Shall yet return, by ABSENCE crowned, And scatter livelier roses round.

The 19th Effusion, beginning "Thou bleedest, my poor heart," is known as "On a Discovery Made Too Late." The 20th Effusion is the sonnet to Schiller. The lines which were sent to Lamb, written in December, 1794, are called "To a Friend, together with an unfinished poem" ("Religious Musings"). Coleridge's "Restless Gale" is the imitation of Ossian, beginning, "The stream with languid murmur creeps." "Foodful" occurs thus in the lines "To an Infant":--

Alike the foodful fruit and scorching fire Awake thy eager grasp and young desire.

Coleridge did not alter the phrase.

Lamb contributed four effusions to this volume of Coleridge's: the 7th, to Mrs. Siddons (written in conjunction with Coleridge), the 11th, 12th and 13th. All were signed C. L. Coleridge had permitted himself to make various alterations. The following parallel will show the kind of treatment to which Lamb objected:--

LAMB'S ORIGINAL EFFUSION (11)

Was it some sweet device of Faery That mock'd my steps with many a lonely glade, And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid?

Have these things been? or what rare witchery, Impregning with delights the charmed air, Enlighted up the semblance of a smile In those fine eyes? methought they spake the while Soft soothing things, which might enforce despair To drop the murdering knife, and let go by His foul resolve. And does the lonely glade Still court the foot-steps of the fair-hair'd maid?

Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh?

While I forlorn do wander reckless where, And 'mid my wanderings meet no Anna there.

AS ALTERED BY COLERIDGE

Was it some sweet device of faery land That mock'd my steps with many a lonely glade, And fancied wand'rings with a fair-hair'd maid?

Have these things been? Or did the wizard wand Of Merlin wave, impregning vacant air, And kindle up the vision of a smile In those blue eyes, that seem'd to speak the while Such tender things, as might enforce Despair To drop the murth'ring knife, and let go by His fell resolve? Ah me! the lonely glade Still courts the footsteps of the fair-hair'd maid, Among whose locks the west-winds love to sigh: But I forlorn do wander, reckless where, And mid my wand'rings find no ANNA there!

In Effusion 12 Lamb had written:--

Or we might sit and tell some tender tale Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn, A tale of true love, or of friend forgot; And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail In gentle sort, on those who practise not Or Love or pity, though of woman born.

Coleridge made it:--

But ah! sweet scenes of fancied bliss, adieu!

On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers I all too long have lost the dreamy hours!

Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo, If haply she her golden meed impart To realize the vision of the heart.

Again in the 13th Effusion, "Written at Midnight, by the Sea-side, after a Voyage," Lamb had dotted out the last two lines. Coleridge subst.i.tuted the couplet:--

How Reason reel'd! What gloomy transports rose!

Till the rude das.h.i.+ngs rock'd them to repose.

Effusion 2, which Lamb would omit, was the sonnet "To Burke;" Effusion 3, "To Mercy" (on Pitt); Effusion 5, "To Erskine;" Effusion 7, Lamb and Coleridge's joint sonnet, "To Mrs. Siddons;" and Effusion 8, "To Koskiusko." The "Lines Written in Early Youth" were afterwards called "Lines on an Autumnal Evening." The poem called "Recollection," in _The Watchman_, was reborn as "Sonnet to the River Otter." The lines on the early blossom were praised by Lamb in a previous letter. The 10th Effusion was the sonnet to Earl Stanhope.

G.o.dwin was William G.o.dwin, the philosopher. We shall later see much of him. It was Allen's wife, not Stoddart's, who had a grown-up daughter.

_Ned Evans_ was a novel in four volumes, published in 1796, an imitation of _Tom Jones_, which presumably Coleridge was reviewing for the _Critical Review_.

Young W. Evans is said by Mr. d.y.k.es Campbell to have been the only son of the Mrs. Evans who befriended Coleridge when he was at Christ's Hospital, the mother of his first love, Mary Evans. Evans was at school with Coleridge and Lamb. We shall meet with him again.

William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), the sonneteer, who had exerted so powerful a poetical influence on Coleridge's mind, was at this time rector of Cricklade in Wilts.h.i.+re (1792-1797), but had been ill at Bath.

The elegy in question was "Elegiac Stanzas written during sickness at Bath, December, 1795." The lines quoted by Lamb are respectively in the 6th, 4th, 5th and 19th Stanzas.

Sophia Pringle. Probably the subject of a Catnach or other popular broadside. I have not found it.

Izaak Walton. Lamb returns to praises of _The Compleat Angler_ in his letter to Robert Lloyd referred to on page 215.

The reference to the Unitarian chapel bears probably upon an offer of a pulpit to Coleridge. The tutors.h.i.+p was probably that offered to Coleridge by Mrs. Evans of Darley Hall (no relation to Mary Evans) who wished him to teach her sons. Neither project was carried through.]

LETTER 4

(_Apparently a continuation of a letter the first part of which is missing_)

CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Begun] Monday Night [June 13, 1796].

UNFURNISHED at present with any sheet-filling subject, I shall continue my letter gradually and journal-wise. My second thoughts entirely coincide with your comments on "Joan of Arc," and I can only wonder at my childish judgment which overlooked the 1st book and could prefer the 9th: not that I was insensible to the soberer beauties of the former, but the latter caught me with its glare of magic,--the former, however, left a more pleasing general recollection in my mind. Let me add, the 1st book was the favourite of my sister--and _I_ now, with Joan, often "think on Domremi and the fields of Arc." I must not pa.s.s over without acknowledging my obligations to your full and satisfactory account of personifications. I have read it again and again, and it will be a guide to my future taste. Perhaps I had estimated Southey's merits too much by number, weight, and measure. I now agree completely and entirely in your opinion of the genius of Southey. Your own image of melancholy is ill.u.s.trative of what you teach, and in itself masterly. I conjecture it is "disbranched" from one of your embryo "hymns." When they are mature of birth (were I you) I should print 'em in one separate volume, with "Religious Musings" and your part of the "Joan of Arc." Birds of the same soaring wing should hold on their flight in company. Once for all (and by renewing the subject you will only renew in me the condemnation of Tantalus), I hope to be able to pay you a visit (if you are then at Bristol) some time in the latter end of August or beginning of September for a week or fortnight; before that time, office business puts an absolute veto on my coming.

"And if a sigh that speaks regret of happier times appear, A glimpse of joy that we have met shall s.h.i.+ne and dry the tear."

Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty. That I get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of her life--that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness--and for many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her breast which she bore with true Christian patience. You may think that I have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly master but recollect I have designedly given in to her own way of feeling--and if she had a failing, 'twas that she respected her master's family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little. The lines begin imperfectly, as I may probably connect 'em if I finish at all,--and if I do, Biggs shall print 'em in a more economical way than you yours, for (Sonnets and all) they won't make a thousand lines as I propose completing 'em, and the substance must be wire-drawn.

Tuesday Evening, June 14, 1796.

I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and with your leave will try my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of ill.u.s.trative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife for a Month;" 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight;--"The game of _death_ was never played so n.o.bly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca;"--"Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification; only it just caught my eye in a little extract book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are you acquainted with Ma.s.singer? At a hazard I will trouble you with a pa.s.sage from a play of his called "A Very Woman." The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the double endings. You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose. "Not far from where my father lives, _a lady_, a neighbour by, blest with as great a _beauty_ as nature durst bestow without _undoing_, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times she _dwelt in_. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate _incense_, nor I no way to flatter but my _fondness_; in all the bravery my friends could _show me_, in all the faith my innocence could _give me_, in the best language my true tongue could _tell me_, and all the broken sighs my sick heart _lend me_, I sued and served; long did I serve this _lady_, long was my travail, long my trade to _win her_; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER." "Then she must love." "She did, but never me: she could not _love me_; she would not love, she hated,--more, she _scorn'd me_; and in so poor and base a way _abused me_ for all my services, for all my _bounties_, so bold neglects flung on me."--"What out of love, and worthy love, I _gave her_ (shame to her most unworthy mind,) to fools, to girls, to fiddlers and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me." One more pa.s.sage strikes my eye from B. and F.'s "Palamon and Arcite." One of 'em complains in prison: "This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," &c. Is not the last circ.u.mstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins, in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius?

Ma.s.singer treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of matter. Southey in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and F. in his [their] "Maid's Tragedy" and some parts of "Philaster" in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper in his "Crazy Kate," and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation. The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What n.o.bler than the appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad--the lines ending with "Dread sounding, bounding on the silver bow!"

I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation; it afforded me high pleasure. As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my hands, is a young man's in our office, of a French novel. What in the original was literally "amiable delusions of the fancy," he proposed to render "the fair frauds of the imagination!" I had much trouble in licking the book into any meaning at all. Yet did the knave clear fifty or sixty pounds by subscription and selling the copyright. The book itself not a week's work! To-day's portion of my journalising epistle has been very dull and poverty-stricken. I will here end.

Tuesday Night.

I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (a.s.sociated circ.u.mstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation); my eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but my heart is awake; and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as feelings, I could say ten hundred kind things. Coleridge, you know not my supreme happiness at having one on earth (though counties separate us) whom I can call a friend. Remember you those tender lines of Logan?--

"Our broken friends.h.i.+ps we deplore, And loves of youth that are no more; No after friends.h.i.+ps e'er can raise Th' endearments of our early days, And ne'er the heart such fondness prove, As when we first began to love."

I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not _equally_ understand, as you will be sober when you read it; but _my_ sober and _my_ half-tipsy hours you are alike a sharer in. Good night.