Letters to Miss Betham and her little Sister.--To Wordsworth.--Manning's
Return.--Coleridge goes to Highgate.--Letter to Miss Hutchinson on
Mary's state.--Removal to Russell Street.--Mary's Letter to Dorothy
Wordsworth.--Lodgings at Dalston.--Death of John Lamb and Captain
Burney.
1815-21.--Æt. 51-57.
In a letter to Southey, dated May 16th, 1815, Lamb says: "Have you
seen Matilda Betham's _Lay of Marie_? I think it very delicately
pretty as to sentiment, &c."
Matilda, the daughter of a country clergyman of ancient lineage
(author of learned and laborious _Genealogical Tables_, &c. &c.), was
a lady of many talents and ambitions; especially of the laudable one,
not so common in those days, to lighten the burthen of a large family
of brothers and sisters by earning her own living. She went up to
London, taught herself miniature painting, exhibited at Somerset
House, gave Shakespeare readings, wrote a _Biographical Dictionary of
Celebrated Women_, contributed verses to the magazines; and, last not
least, by her genuine love of knowledge, and her warm and kindly
heart, won the cordial liking of many men of genius, notably of
Coleridge, Southey, and the Lambs. When this same _Lay of Marie_ was
on the stocks, Mary took an earnest interest in its success, as the
following letter prettily testifies:--
"My brother and myself return you a thousand thanks for your kind
communication. We have read your poem many times over with increased
interest, and very much wish to see you to tell you how highly we have
been pleased with it. May we beg one favour? I keep the manuscript, in
the hope that you will grant it. It is that either now, or when the
whole poem is completed, you will read it over with us. When I say
with _us_, of course I mean Charles. I know that you have many
judicious friends, but I have so often known my brother spy out errors
in a manuscript which has passed through many judicious hands, that I
shall not be easy if you do not permit him to look yours carefully
through with you; and also you _must_ allow him to correct the press
for you. If I knew where to find you I would call upon you. Should you
feel nervous at the idea of meeting Charles in the capacity of a
_severe censor_, give me a line, and I will come to you anywhere and
convince you in five minutes that he is even timid, stammers, and can
scarcely speak for modesty and fear of giving pain when he finds
himself placed in that kind of office. Shall I appoint a time to see
you here when he is from home? I will send him out any time you will
name; indeed I am always naturally alone till four o'clock. If you are
nervous about coming, remember I am equally so about the liberty I
have taken, and shall be till we meet and laugh off our mutual fears."
"I return you by a careful hand the MSS.," wrote Charles. "Did I not
ever love your verses? The domestic half will be a sweet heirloom to
have in the family. 'Tis fragrant with cordiality. What friends you
must have had, or dreamed of having! and what a widow's cruse of
heartiness you have doled among them!"
But as to the correction of the press, that proved a rash suggestion
on Mary's part; for the task came at an untoward time, and Charles had
to write a whimsical-repentant letter, which must have gone far to
atone for his shortcoming:--
"All this while I have been tormenting myself with the thought of having
been ungracious to you, and you have been all the while accusing
yourself. Let us absolve one another and be quiet. My head is in such a
state from incapacity for business, that I certainly know it to be my
duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how
I can go on. I have tried to get some redress by explaining my health,
but with no great success. No one can tell how ill I am, because it does
not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull, deep and
invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black-jaundiced skin-over, or that
all was as well within as my cursed looks. You must not think me worse
than I am. I am determined not to be overset, but to give up business
rather, and get 'em to allow me a trifle for services past. Oh, that I
had been a shoemaker, or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune.
Oh, darling laziness! Heaven of Epicurus! Saint's Everlasting Rest! that
I could drink vast potations of thee through unmeasured Eternity. _Otium
cum vel sine dignitate._ Scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of
_repose_. I stand not upon the _dignified sort_. Accursed, damned desks,
trade, commerce, business. Inventions of that old original busy-body,
brain-working Satan--Sabbathless, restless Satan. A curse relieves; do
you ever try it? A strange letter to write to a lady, but more honeyed
sentences will not distil. I dare not ask who revises in my stead. I
have drawn you into a scrape, and am ashamed, but I know no remedy. My
unwellness must be my apology. God bless you (tho' he curse the India
House and fire it _to the ground_), and may no unkind error creep into
_Marie_. May all its readers like it as well as I do, and everybody
about you like its kind author no worse! Why the devil am I never to
have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts in verse or prose
again? Why must I write of tea and drugs, and price goods and bales of
indigo? Farewell...."
Miss Betham possessed the further merit of having a charming little
sister, for such she must surely have been to be the cause and the
recipient of such a letter as the following from Mary. Barbara Betham
was then fourteen years old:--
"November 2, 1814.
"It is very long since I have met with such an agreeable surprise as
the sight of your letter, my kind kind young friend, afforded me. Such
a nice letter as it is too; and what a pretty hand you write! I
congratulate you on this attainment with great pleasure, because I
have so often felt the disadvantage of my own wretched handwriting.
You wish for London news. I rely upon your sister Ann for gratifying
you in this respect, yet I have been endeavouring to recollect whom
you might have seen here, and what may have happened to them since,
and this effort has only brought the image of little Barbara Betham,
unconnected with any other person, so strongly before my eyes, that I
seem as if I had no other subject to write upon. Now I think I see you
with your feet propped upon the fender, your two hands spread out upon
your knees--an attitude you always chose when we were in familiar
confidential conversation together--telling me long stories of your
own home, where now you say you are 'moping on with the same thing
every day,' and which then presented nothing but pleasant
recollections to your mind. How well I remember your quiet, steady
face bent over your book. One day, conscience-stricken at having
wasted so much of your precious time in reading, and feeling yourself,
as you prettily said, 'quite useless to me,' you went to my drawers
and hunted out some unhemmed pocket-handkerchiefs, and by no means
could I prevail upon you to resume your story-books till you had
hemmed them all. I remember, too, your teaching my little maid to
read, your sitting with her a whole evening to console her for the
death of her sister, and that she, in her turn, endeavoured to become
a comforter to you, the next evening, when you wept at the sight of
Mrs. Holcroft, from whose school you had recently eloped because you
were not partial to sitting in the stocks. Those tears, and a few you
dropped when my brother teased you about your supposed fondness for an
apple-dumpling, were the only interruptions to the calm contentedness
of your unclouded brow.
"We still remain the same as you left us, neither taller, nor wiser,
or perceptibly older; but three years must have made a great
alteration in you. How very much, dear Barbara, I should like to see
you!
"We still live in Temple Lane, but I am now sitting in a room you
never saw. Soon after you left us we were distressed by the cries of a
cat, which seemed to proceed from the garrets adjoining to ours, and
only separated from ours by a locked door on the farther side of my
brother's bed-room, which you know was the little room at the top of
the kitchen stairs. We had the lock forced, and let poor puss out from
behind a panel of the wainscot, and she lived with us from that time,
for we were in gratitude bound to keep her, as she had introduced us
to four untenanted, unowned rooms, and by degrees we have taken
possession of these unclaimed apartments, first putting up lines to
dry our clothes, then moving my brother's bed into one of these more
commodious than his own rooms; and last winter, my brother being
unable to pursue a work he had begun, owing to the kind interruptions
of friends who were more at leisure than himself, I persuaded him that
he might write at ease in one of these rooms, as he could not then
hear the door-knock, or hear himself denied to be at home, which was
sure to make him call out and convict the poor maid in a fib. Here, I
said, he might be, almost really not at home. So I put in an old
grate, and made him a fire in the largest of these garrets, and
carried in his own table and one chair, and bid him write away and
consider himself as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst
of Salisbury Plain, or any other wide, unfrequented place where he
could expect few visitors to break in upon his solitude. I left him
quite delighted with his new acquisition, but in a few hours he came
down again, with a sadly dismal face. He could do nothing, he said,
with those bare white-washed walls before his eyes. He could not write
in that dull unfurnished prison!
"The next day, before he came home from his office, I had gathered up
various bits of old carpeting to cover the floor; and to a little
break the blank look of the bare walls I hung up a few old prints that
used to ornament the kitchen; and after dinner, with great boast of
what improvement I had made, I took Charles once more into his new
study. A week of busy labours followed, in which I think you would not
have disliked to be our assistant. My brother and I almost covered the
walls with prints, for which purpose he cut out every print from every
book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask my leave
to strip a fresh poor author, which he might not do, you know, without
my permission, as I am elder sister. There was such pasting, such
consultation upon these portraits, and where the series of pictures
from Ovid, Milton, and Shakspeare would show to most advantage, and in
what obscure corners authors of humble rank should be allowed to tell
their stories. All the books gave up their stores but one, a translation
from Ariosto, a delicious set of four and twenty prints, and for which
I had marked out a conspicuous place; when lo, we found at the moment
the scissors were going to work, that a part of the poem was printed
at the back of every picture! What a cruel disappointment! To conclude
this long story about nothing, the poor despised garret is now called
the print room, and is become our most familiar sitting-room.... The
lions still live in Exeter Change. Returning home through the Strand,
I often hear them roar about twelve o'clock at night. I never hear
them without thinking of you, because you seemed so pleased with the
sight of them, and said your young companions would stare when you
told them you had seen a lion.
"And now, my dear Barbara, farewell. I have not written such a long
letter a long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write
about. Wishing you may pass happily through the rest of your schooldays
and every future day of your life,
"I remain,
"Your affectionate friend,
"M. LAMB.
"My brother sends his love to you. You say you are not so tall as
Louisa--you must be; you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your
family" ["the measureless Bethams," Lamb called them]. "Now you have
begun I shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from you again. I
shall always receive a letter from you with very great delight."
The next is a joint letter to Wordsworth, in acknowledgment of an
early copy of _The Excursion_, in which Charles holds the pen and is
the chief spokesman; but Mary puts in a judicious touch of her own:--
"August 14th, 1814.
"I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great
armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest
of the world, too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking
to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to
thank you, but Mr. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and
made holy theft of it; but we expect restitution in a day or two. It
is the noblest conversational poem I ever read--a day in Heaven. The
part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my
memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the
Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren born out
of due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind
man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the
Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were
all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the
beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I first
saw you at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't
know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for
partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous; I think it must have
been the identical one we saw on Salisbury plain five years ago, that
drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from the rise of
that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had gifted
eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the
prophet saw them in that sunset--the wheel, the potter's clay, the
wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the
four-fold visaged head, the throne and Him that sat thereon." [It was
a mist glorified by sunshine, not a sunset, which the poet had described,
as Lamb afterwards discovered.] "One feeling I was particularly struck
with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering
it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness
and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just
entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness or
being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure
country, exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am feeling
that which I cannot express. Reading your lines about it fixed me for
a time, a monument in Harrow Church. Do you know it? With its fine
long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high
site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.
"I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in
brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many
more, for it will be a stock-book with me while eyes or spectacles
shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about
mountain-scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a
poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have
felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark
during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver
in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that
invisible part of us in her.
"C. LAMB AND SISTER."
Manning, who had latterly been "tarrying on the skirts of creation" in
far Thibet and Tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last,
in 1815, appeared once more on the horizon at the "half-way house" of
Canton, to which place Lamb hazarded a letter,--a most incomparable
"lying letter," and another to confess the cheat to St. Helena:--"Have
you recovered the breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which
you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of
France was living in St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the
seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon.... Mary
reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false
Nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to
wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a
surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to _leave off
tobacco_! Surely there must be some other world in which this
unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her
generous aspirings implanted in her in vain."
Manning brought with him on his return much material for compiling a
Chinese Dictionary; which purpose, however, remained unfulfilled. He
left no other memorial of himself than his friendship with Lamb. "You
see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers,
and will leave the world without anyone hardly but me knowing how
stupendous a creature he is," said Lamb of him. Henceforth their
intercourse was chiefly personal.
Coleridge also, who of late had been almost as much lost to his
friends as if he too were in Tartary or Thibet, though now and then
"like a re-appearing star" standing up before them when least
expected, was at the beginning of April 1816 once more in London,
endeavouring to get his tragedy of _Remorse_ accepted at Covent
Garden. "Nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to its best
end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a chemist's
laboratory in Norfolk Street," writes Lamb to Wordsworth. "She might
as well as have sent a _Helluo Liborum_ for cure to the Vatican. He
has done pretty well as yet. Tell Miss Hutchinson my sister is every
day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter,
but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; God bless him!"
But Coleridge was more in earnest than Lamb supposed in his
determination to break through his thraldom to opium. Either way, he
himself believed that death was imminent: to go on was deadly, and a
physician of eminence had told him that to abstain altogether would,
probably, be equally fatal. He therefore found a medical man willing
to undertake the care of him: to exercise absolute surveillance for a
time and watch the results. It is an affecting letter in which he
commits himself into Mr. Gillman's hands:--"You will never _hear_
anything but truth from me, prior habits render it out of my power to
tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed I dare not promise that
I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of
acting one.... For the first week I must not be permitted to leave
your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be
done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute
commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror
that haunts my mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have suffered
from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm
me. If (as I feel for the _first time_ a soothing confidence it will
prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it
is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have
(and thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm
ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will
thank you with reverence." That confidence was justified, those thanks
well earned. In the middle of April 1816 Coleridge took up his abode
with the Gillmans at No. 3 The Grove, at Highgate, and found there a
serene haven in which he anchored for the rest of life; freeing
himself by slow degrees from the opium bondage, though too shattered
in frame ever to recover sound health; too far spent, morally and
mentally, by the long struggles and abasements he had gone through to
renew the splendours of his youth. That "shaping spirit of
imagination" with which nature had endowed him drooped languidly, save
in fitful moments of fervid talk; that "fertile, subtle, expansive
understanding" could not fasten with the long-sustained intensity
needful to grapple victoriously with the great problems that filled
his mind. The look of "timid earnestness" which Carlyle noted in his
eyes expressed a mental attitude--a mixture of boldness and fear, a
desire to seek truth at all hazards, yet also to drag Authority with
him, as a safe and comfortable prop to rest on. But his eloquence had
lost none of its richness and charm, his voice none of its sweetness.
"His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory, an
archangel a little damaged," says Lamb to Wordsworth. "He is absent
but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as
the presence of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be within the
whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in
quiet."
Besides the renewed proximity of these two oldest and dearest of
friends, two new ones, both very young, both future biographers of
Lamb, were in these years added to the number of his intimates,--Talfourd
in 1815, Proctor in 1817. Leigh Hunt had become one probably as early
as 1812; Crabb Robinson in 1806; Thomas Hood, who stood in the front
rank of his younger friends, and Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet,
Lamb's chief correspondent during the last ten years of his life, not
until 1822-3.
The years did not pass without each bringing a recurrence of one,
sometimes of two severe attacks of Mary's disorder. In the autumn of
1815 Charles repeats again the sad story to Miss Hutchinson:--
"I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill
and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very
lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at
one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look
forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can.
She has begun to show some favourable symptoms. The return of her
disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six
months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E.
I. House was partly the cause of her illness; but one always imputes
it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause
we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out
of the time, the little time we shall have to live together. I don't
know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain
her death better than if we had no partial separations. But I won't
talk of death. I will imagine us immortal or forget that we are
otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal
together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or
taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of
them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are
assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,--'the wind is
tempered to the shorn Lambs.' Poor C. Lloyd" [he was suffering from
the same dread malady], "poor Priscilla! I feel I hardly feel enough
for him; my own calamities press about me and involve me in a thick
integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfortunes. But I
feel all I can--all the kindness I can towards you all."
More and more sought by an enlarging circle of friends, chambers in
the Temple offered facilities for the dropping in of acquaintance upon
the Lambs at all hours of the day and night, which, social as they
were, was harassing, wearing and, to Mary, very injurious. This it
was, doubtless, which induced them to take the step announced by her
in the following letter to Dorothy Wordsworth:--
"November 21, 1817.
"Your kind letter has given us very great pleasure; the sight of your
handwriting was a most welcome surprise to us. We have heard good
tidings of you by all our friends who were so fortunate as to visit
you this summer, and rejoice to see it confirmed by yourself. You have
quite the advantage in volunteering a letter; there is no merit in
replying to so welcome a stranger.
"We have left the Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear this. I
know I have never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal
Mount, as when I could connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere
Cottage. Our rooms were dirty and out of repair, and the
inconveniences of living in chambers became every year more irksome,
and so, at last, we mustered up resolution enough to leave the good
old place that so long had sheltered us, and here we are, living at a
brazier's shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place all
alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our
front, and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the
carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least;
strange that it does not, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy
looking out of the window, and listening to the calling up of the
carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. It is the
oddest scene to look down upon; I am sure you would be amused with it.
It is well I am in a cheerful place, or I should have many misgivings
about leaving the Temple. I look forward with great pleasure to the
prospect of seeing my good friend, Miss Hutchinson. I wish Rydal
Mount, with all its inhabitants enclosed, were to be transplanted with
her, and to remain stationary in the midst of Covent Garden. I passed
through the street lately where Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth lodged;
several fine new houses, which were then just rising out of the
ground, are quite finished, and a noble entrance made that way into
Portland Place. I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey. What a blunder the
poor man made when he took up his dwelling among the mountains! I long
to see my friend Pypos. Coleridge is still at Little Hampton with Mrs.
Gillman; he has been so ill as to be confined to his room almost the
whole time he has been there.
"Charles has had all his Hogarths bound in a book; they were sent home
yesterday, and now that I have them altogether, and perceive the
advantage of peeping close at them through my spectacles, I am
reconciled to the loss of their hanging round the room, which has been
a great mortification to me. In vain I tried to console myself with
looking at our new chairs and carpets, for we have got new chairs and
carpets covering all over our two sitting rooms; I missed my old
friends, and could not be comforted. Then I would resolve to learn to
look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I
have given it up as a thing quite impracticable--yet, when I was at
Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the
sea, not even to look in a book: I had not seen the sea for sixteen
years. Mrs. Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued
her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played
truants and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little
mountains, and _almost as good as_ Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we
made discoveries of many pleasant walks, which few of the Brighton
visitors have ever dreamed of--for, like as is the case in the
neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we are
sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude. I hope we shall meet
before the walking faculties of either of us fail; you say you can
walk fifteen miles with ease; that is exactly my stint, and more
fatigues me; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping
very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish. God bless
you and yours. Love to all and each one."
In the spring of 1820 the Lambs took lodgings at Stoke Newington
without, however, giving up the Russell Street home,--for the sake of
rest and quiet; the change from the Temple to Covent Garden not having
proved much of a success in that respect, and the need grown serious.
Even Lamb's mornings at the office and his walk thence were besieged
by officious acquaintance: then, as he tells Wordsworth, "up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door;
in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my
brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating
alone! eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come,
and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange; for my meat turns into a stone when any one dines with me if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly)--and with the hatred a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go!... Evening
company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated
with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the golden
morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should
covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in
which I can get two or one to myself. I am never C. L., but always C.
L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone preserve me
from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I
forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to
annoy me."...
It was during the Russell Street days that the Lambs made the
acquaintance of Vincent Novello. He had a little daughter, Mary
Victoria, afterwards Mrs. Cowden-Clarke, whose heart Mary won, leaving
many sweet and happy impressions of herself graven there, which
eventually took shape in her _Recollections of Writers_. Mrs. Novello
had lost a baby in the spring of 1820, and from the quiet of Stoke
Newington Mary wrote her a sweet letter of condolence:--
"Spring, 1820.
"Since we heard of your sad sorrow, you have been perpetually in our
thoughts; therefore you may well imagine how welcome your kind
remembrance of us must be. I know not how to thank you for it. You bid
me write a long letter; but my mind is so possessed with the idea that
you must be occupied with one only thought, that all trivial matters
seem impertinent. I have just been reading again Mr. Hunt's delicious
essay [_Deaths of Little Children_], which, I am sure, must have come
so home to your hearts. I shall always love him for it. I feel that it
is all that one can think, but which no one but he could have done so
prettily. May he lose the memory of his own babies in seeing them all
grow old around him. Together with the recollection of your dear baby
the image of a little sister I once had comes as fresh into my mind as
if I had seen her lately.... I long to see you, and I hope to do so on
Tuesday or Wednesday in next week. Percy Street! I love to write the
word. What comfortable ideas it brings with it! We have been pleasing
ourselves, ever since we heard this unexpected piece of good news,
with the anticipation of frequent drop-in visits and all the social
comfort of what seems almost next-door neighbourhood.
"Our solitary confinement has answered its purpose even better than I
expected. It is so many years since I have been out of town in the
spring that I scarcely knew of the existence of such a season. I see,
every day, some new flower peeping out of the ground, and watch its
growth; so that I have a sort of intimate friendship with each. I know
the effect of every change of weather upon them--have learned all
their names, the duration of their lives, and the whole progress of
their domestic economy. My landlady, a nice, active old soul that
wants but one year of eighty, and her daughter, a rather aged young
gentlewoman, are the only labourers in a pretty large garden; for it
is a double house, and two long strips of ground are laid into one,
well stored with fruit trees, which will be in full blossom the week
after I am gone, and flowers, as many as can be crammed in, of all
sorts and kinds. But flowers are flowers still; and I must confess I
would rather live in Russell Street all my life, and never set my foot
but on the London pavement, than be doomed always to enjoy the silent
pleasures I now do. We go to bed at ten o'clock. Late hours are
life-shortening things, but I would rather run all risks, and sit
every night--at some places I could name--wishing in vain at eleven
o'clock for the entrance of the supper tray, than be always up and
alive at eight o'clock breakfast as I am here. We have a scheme to
reconcile these things. We have an offer of a very low-rented lodging
a mile nearer town than this. Our notion is to divide our time in
alternate weeks between quiet rest and dear London weariness. We give
an answer to-morrow; but what that will be at this present writing I
am unable to say. In the present state of our undecided opinion, a
very heavy rain that is now falling may turn the scale.... Dear rain,
do go away, and let us have a fine chearful sunset to argue the matter
fairly in. My brother walked seventeen miles yesterday before dinner.
And, notwithstanding his long walk to and from the office, we walk
every evening; but I by no means perform in this way so well as I used
to do. A twelve mile walk, one hot Sunday morning, made my feet
blister, and they are hardly well now...."
"A fine cheerful sunset" did smile, it seems, upon the project of
permanent country lodgings; for during the next three years the Lambs
continued to alternate between "dear London weariness" in Russell
Street, and rest and quiet work at Dalston. Years they were which
produced nearly all the most delightful of the _Essays of Elia_.
The year 1821 closed gloomily;--"I stepped into the Lambs' cottage at
Dalston," writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, Nov. 18; "Mary pale and
thin, just recovered from one of her attacks. They have lost their
brother John, and feel the loss." And the very same week died fine old
Captain Burney. He had been made Admiral but a fortnight before his
death. These gaps among the old familiar faces struck chill to their
hearts. In a letter to Wordsworth of the following spring Lamb says:
"We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness
to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and
another accident or two at the same time that have made me almost bury
myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish.
Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two
or three have died within the last two twelvemonths, and so many parts
of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts
a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference
to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly
suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of
sympathies. There's Captain Burney gone! What fun has whist now? What
matters it what you lead if you can no longer fancy him looking over
you? One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person
occurs with whom alone, almost, you would care to share the intelligence.
Thus one distributes oneself about, and now for so many parts of me I
have lost the market." It was while John's death was yet recent that
Lamb wrote some tender recollections of him (fact and fiction blended
according to Elia's wont) in _Dream Children, a Reverie_, telling how
handsome and spirited he had been in his youth, "and how when he died,
though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a
great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and
how I bore his death, as I thought pretty well at first, but
afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take
it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long and knew not till then how much I
had loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and
wished him to be alive again to be quarrelling with him (for we
quarrelled sometimes) rather than not have him again."