The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 24

There is glory to me in thy Name, Meek follower of Bethlehem's Child, More touching by far than the splendour of Fame With which the vain world is beguil'd,

and "A Memorial of James Nayler." The following "Sonnet to Elia," from the _London Magazine_, is also in the volume: it is odd that Lamb did not mention it:--

SONNET TO ELIA

Delightful Author! unto whom I owe Moments and moods of fancy and of feeling, Afresh to grateful memory now appealing, Fain would I "bless thee--ere I let thee go!"

From month to month has the exhaustless flow Of thy original mind, its wealth revealing, With quaintest humour, and deep pathos healing The World's rude wounds, revived Life's early glow: And, mixt with this, at times, to earnest thought, Glimpses of truth, most simple and sublime, By thy imagination have been brought Over my spirit. From the olden time Of authors.h.i.+p thy patent should be dated, And thou with Marvell, Brown, and Burton mated.]

LETTER 348

CHARLES LAMB TO W. MARTER [Dated at end: July 19 (1824).]

Dear Marter,--I have just rec'd your letter, having returned from a month's holydays. My exertions for the London are, tho' not dead, in a dead sleep for the present. If your club like scandal, Blackwood's is your magazine; if you prefer light articles, and humorous without offence, the New Monthly is very amusing. The best of it is by Horace Smith, the author of the Rejected Addresses. The Old Monthly has more of matter, information, but not so merry. I cannot safely recommend any others, as not knowing them, or knowing them to their disadvantage. Of Reviews, beside what you mention, I know of none except the Review on Hounslow Heath, which I take it is too expensive for your ordering. Pity me, that have been a Gentleman these four weeks, and am reduced in one day to the state of a ready writer. I feel, I feel, my gentlemanly qualities fast oozing away--such as a sense of honour, neckcloths twice a day, abstinence from swearing, &c. The desk enters into my soul.

See my thoughts on business next Page.

SONNET

Who first invented _work?_--and bound the free And holyday-rejoicing Spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of _Business_ in the green fields, and the Town-- To plough, loom, [anvil], spade, and (oh most sad!) To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?

Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! He, who his unglad Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel-- For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel-- In that red realm from whence are no returnings; Where toiling & turmoiling ever & aye He and his Thoughts keep pensive worky-day.

With many recollections of pleasanter times, my old compeer, happily released before me, Adieu. C. LAMB.

E.I.H.

19 July [1824].

[Marter was an old India House clerk; we do not meet with him again. The sonnet had been printed in _The Examiner_ in 1819. Lamb, who was fond of it, reprinted it in _Alb.u.m Verses_, 1830.]

LETTER 349

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN

[P.M. July 28, 1824.]

My dear Sir--I must appear negligent in not having thanked you for the very pleasant books you sent me. Arthur, and the Novel, we have both of us read with unmixed satisfaction. They are full of quaint conceits, and running over with good humour and good nature. I naturally take little interest in story, but in these the manner and not the end is the interest; it is such pleasant travelling, one scarce cares whither it leads us. Pray express our pleasure to your father with my best thanks.

I am involved in a routine of visiting among the family of Barren Field, just ret'd, from Botany Bay--I shall hardly have an open Evening before TUESDAY next. Will you come to us then?

Yours truly, C. LAMB.

Wensday

28 July 24.

[_Arthur_ and the Novel were two books by Charles Dibdin the Younger, the father of Lamb's correspondent. Arthur was _Young Arthur; or, The Child of Mystery: A Metrical Romance_, 1819, and the novel was _Isn't It Odd?_ three volumes of high-spirited ramblings something in the manner of _Tristram Shandy_, nominally written by Marmaduke Merrywhistle, and published in 1822.

Barron Field had returned from his Judges.h.i.+p in New South Wales on June 18.]

LETTER 350

(_Possibly incomplete_)

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD [P.M. August 10, 1824.]

And what dost thou at the Priory? _Cucullus non facit Monachum_. English me that, and challenge old Lignum Janua to make a better.

My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately; but there Hope sits every day, speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of sp.a.w.n; for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning thick as motelings,--little things o o o like _that_, that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic land bays that be as thou goest to Lover's Seat: neither of that little churchling in the midst of a wood (in the opposite direction, nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropped by the Angel that was tired of carrying two packages; marry, with the other he made s.h.i.+ft to pick his flight to Loretto. Inquire out, and see my little Protestant Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation; yet hath it pulpit, reading-desk, and trim front of ma.s.siest marble, as if Robinson Crusoe had reared it to soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its Christian name, and what she-saint was its gossip.

You should also go to No. 13, Standgate Street,--a baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties,--sea dragons, polypi, mer-people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old gentleman in black (not the Devil) that lodged with him a week (he'll remember) last July, and he will show courtesy. He is by far the foremost of the savans. His wife is the funniest thwarting little animal! They are decidedly the Lions of green Hastings. Well, I have made an end of my say. My epistolary time is gone by when I could have scribbled as long (I will not say as agreeable) as thine was to both of us. I am dwindled to notes and letterets. But, in good earnest, I shall be most happy to hail thy return to the waters of Old Sir Hugh. There is nothing like inland murmurs, fresh ripples, and our native minnows.

"He sang in meads how sweet the brooklets ran, To the rough ocean and red restless sands."

I design to give up smoking; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent vice. I must have _quid pro quo;_ or _quo pro quid_, as Tom Woodgate would correct me. My service to him. C.L.

[This is the first letter to Hood, then a young man of twenty-five, and a.s.sistant editor of the _London Magazine_. He was now staying at Hastings, on his honeymoon, presumably, and, like the Lambs, near the Priory.

"_Cucullus non facit Monachum_"--A "Lamb-pun." The Hood does not make the monk.

"Old Lignum Janua"--the Tom Woodgate mentioned at the end of the letter, a boatman at Hastings. Hood wrote some verses to him.

"My old New River." This pa.s.sage was placed by Hood as the motto of his verses "Walton Redivivus," in _Whims and Oddities_, 1826.

"Little churchling." This is Lamb's second description of Hollingdon Rural. The third and best is in a later letter.

"There is nothing like inland murmurs." Lamb is here remembering Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines:--

With a sweet inland murmur.

In the _Elia_ essay "The Old Margate Hoy" Lamb, in speaking of Hastings, had made the same objection.

In a letter to his sister, written from Hastings at this time, Hood says:--

This is the last of our excursions. We have tried, but in vain, to find out the baker and his wife recommended to us by Lamb as the very lions of green Hastings. There is no such street as he has named throughout the town, and the ovens are singularly numerous. We have given up the search, therefore, but we have discovered the little church in the wood, and it is such a church! It ought to have been our St. Botolph's. ... Such a verdant covert wood Stothard might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta as they walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground shadowed with bluebells, even to the formation of a plumb-like bloom upon its little knolls and ridges; and ever through the dell windeth a little path chequered with the shades of aspens and ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into gra.s.s and weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither.

Meanwhile the wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth anew in some other shade. To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body) with Romance before. Then suppose so much of a s.p.a.ce cleared as maketh a small church _lawn_ to be sprinkled with old gravestones, and in the midst the church itself, a small Christian dovecot, such as Lamb has truly described it, like a little temple of Juan Fernandes. I could have been sentimental and wished to lie some day in that place, its calm tenants seeming to come through such quiet ways, through those verdant alleys, to their graves.

In coming home I killed a viper in our serpentine path, and Mrs.

Fernor says I am by that token to overcome an enemy. Is Taylor or Hessey dead? The reptile was dark and dull, his blood being yet sluggish from the cold; howbeit, he tried to bite, till I cut him in two with a stone. I thought of Hessey's long back-bone when I did it.