Hazlitt's Divorce.--Emma Isola.--Mrs. Cowden Clarke's _Recollections_
of Mary.--The Visit to France.--Removal to Colebrook Cottage.--A
Dialogue of Reminiscences.
1822-3.--Æt. 58-59.
For some years matters had not gone smoothly between Sarah Hazlitt and
her husband. He was hard to live with, and she seems to have given up
the attempt to make the best of things, and to have sunk into a kind
of apathy in which even the duties of a housewife were ill-performed;
but his chief complaint was that "she despised him and his abilities."
In this Hazlitt was, probably, unjust to Sarah; for she was neither
stupid nor unamiable. From 1819 onwards he had absented himself from
home continually, living either at the Huts, a small inn on the edge
of Salisbury Plain, or in London lodgings. But in this year of 1822
his unhappy passion for Sarah Walker brought about a crisis; and what
had been only a negative kind of evil became unendurable. He prevailed
upon Sarah to consent to a divorce. It was obtained, in Edinburgh, by
Mrs. Hazlitt taking what, in Scotch law, is called "the oath of
calumny" which,--the suit being undefended,--entitled her to a
dissolution of the marriage tie. They then returned singly to
Winterslow, he to the Huts and she to her cottage. If they married
with but little love, they seem to have parted without any hate. One
tie remained--the strong affection each had for their son, who was
sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. Hazlitt's wholly
unrequited passion for Sarah Walker soon burned itself to ashes; and
in two years time he tried another experiment in marriage which was
even less successful than the first; for his bride, like Milton's,
declined to return home with him after the wedding tour, and he saw
her face no more. But, unlike Milton, he was little discomposed at the
circumstance. Sarah, grown a wiser if not a more dignified woman, did
not renew the scheming ways of her youth. She continued to stand high
in the esteem of Hazlitt's mother and sister, and often stayed with
them. The Lambs abated none of their old cordiality; Mary wrote few
letters now, but Charles sent her a friendly one sometimes. It was to
her he gave the first account of absent-minded George Dyer's feat of
walking straight into the New River, in broad daylight, on leaving
their door in Colebrook Row. Towards Hazlitt, also, their friendship
seemed substantially unchanged let him be as splenetic and wayward as
he might. "We cannot afford to cast off our friends because they are
not all we could wish," said Mary Lamb once when he had written some
criticisms on Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which glowing admiration
was mixed with savage ridicule in such a way that, as Lamb said, it
was "like saluting a man,--'Sir, you are the greatest man I ever saw,'
and then pulling him by the nose." But it needed only for Hazlitt
himself to be traduced and vilified, as he so often was, by the
political adversaries and critics of those days, for Lamb to rally to
his side and fearlessly pronounce him to be, "in his natural and
healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing."
As a set-off against the already mentioned sorrows of this time, a new
element of cheerfulness was introduced into the Lamb household; for it
was in the course of the summer of 1823 that, during a visit to
Cambridge, they first saw Emma Isola, a little orphan child of whom
they soon grew so fond that eventually she became their adopted
daughter, their solace and comfort. To Mary especially was this a
happy incident. "For," says Mrs. Cowden Clarke in the _Recollections_
already alluded to, "she had a most tender sympathy with the
young,"--as the readers of _Mrs. Leicester's School_ will hardly need
telling. "She was encouraging and affectionate towards them, and won
them to regard her with a familiarity and fondness rarely felt by them
for grown people who are not their relations. She threw herself so
entirely into their way of thinking and contrived to take an estimate
of things so completely from _their_ point of view, that she made them
rejoice to have her for their co-mate in affairs that interested them.
While thus lending herself to their notions she, with a judiciousness
peculiar to her, imbued her words with the wisdom and experience that
belonged to her maturer years; so that while she seemed but the
listening, concurring friend, she was also the helping, guiding
friend. Her monitions never took the form of reproof, but were always
dropped in with the air of agreed propositions, as if they grew out of
the subject in question, and presented themselves as matters of course
to both her young companions and herself." The following is a
life-like picture, from the same hand, of Mary among the children she
gathered round her in these Russell Street days,--Hazlitt's little son
William, Victoria Novello (Mrs. Clarke herself), and Emma Isola.
Victoria used "to come to her on certain mornings, when Miss Lamb
promised to hear her repeat her Latin grammar, and hear her read
poetry with the due musically rhythmical intonation. Even now the
breathing murmur of the voice in which Mary Lamb gave low but
melodious utterance to those opening lines of the _Paradise Lost_:--
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,--
sounding full and rounded and harmonious, though so subdued in tone,
rings clear and distinct in the memory of her who heard the reader.
The echo of that gentle voice vibrates, through the lapse of many a
revolving year, true and unbroken in the heart where the low-breathed
sound first awoke response, teaching together with the fine appreciation
of verse music the finer love of intellect conjoined with goodness and
kindness.... "One morning, just as Victoria was about to repeat her
allotted task, in rushed a young boy who, like herself, enjoyed the
privilege of Miss Lamb's instruction in the Latin language. His mode
of entrance--hasty and abrupt--sufficiently denoted his eagerness to
have his lesson heard at once and done with, that he might be gone
again; accordingly Miss Lamb, asking Victoria to give up her turn,
desired the youth--Hazlitt's son--to repeat his pages of grammar
first. Off he set, rattled through the first conjugation post-haste;
darted through the second without drawing breath; and so on right
through in no time. The rapidity, the volubility, the triumphant
slap-dash of the feat perfectly dazzled the imagination of poor
Victoria, who stood admiring by, an amazed witness of the boy's
proficiency. She herself, a quiet plodding little girl, had only by
dint of diligent study and patient, persevering poring been able to
achieve a slow learning and as slow a repetition of her lessons. This
brilliant, off-hand method of despatching the Latin grammar was a
glory she had never dreamed of. Her ambition was fired, and the next
time she presented herself book in hand before Miss Lamb, she had no
sooner delivered it into her hearer's than she attempted to scour
through her verb at the same rattling pace which had so excited her
admiration. Scarce a moment and her stumbling scamper was checked.
'Stay, stay! how's this? What are you about, little Vicky?' asked the
laughing voice of Mary Lamb. 'Oh, I see. Well, go on; but gently,
gently; no need of hurry.' She heard to an end and then said, 'I see
what we have been doing--trying to be as quick and clever as William,
fancying it vastly grand to get on at a great rate as he does. But
there's this difference: it's natural in him while it's imitation in
you. Now, far better go on in your old staid way--which is your own
way--than try to take up a way that may become him, but can never
become you, even were you to succeed in acquiring it. We'll each of us
keep to our own natural ways, and then we shall be sure to do our
best.'" And when Victoria and Emma Isola met there, Mary entered into
their girlish friendship, let them have their gossip out in her own
room if tired of the restraint of grown-up company and once, before
Emma's return to school, took them to Dulwich and gave them "a
charming little dinner of roast fowl and custard pudding." ...
"Pleasant above all," says the surviving guest and narrator, "is the
memory of the cordial voice which said in a way to put the little
party at its fullest ease, 'Now, remember, we all pick our bones. It
isn't considered vulgar here to pick bones.'
"Once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unexpectedly upon her and
her brother," continues Mrs. Clarke, "just as they were sitting down
to their plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank
hospitality she pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small
joint into five equal portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so
truly her own, 'There's a chop apiece for us, and we can make up with
bread and cheese if we want more.'"
The more serious demands upon her sympathy and judgment made, after
childhood was left behind, by the young, whether man or woman, she met
with no less tenderness, tact, and wisdom. Once, for instance, when
she thought she perceived symptoms of an unexplained dejection in her
young friend Victoria, "how gentle was her sedate mode of reasoning
the matter, after delicately touching upon the subject and
endeavouring to draw forth its avowal! More as if mutually discussing
and consulting than as if questioning, she endeavoured to ascertain
whether uncertainties or scruples of faith had arisen in the young
girl's mind and had caused her preoccupied abstracted manner. If it
were any such source of disturbance, how wisely and feelingly she
suggested reading, reflecting, weighing; if but a less deeply-seated
depression, how sensibly she advised adopting some object to rouse
energy and interest! She pointed out the efficacy of studying a
language (she herself at upwards of fifty years of age began the
acquirement of French and Italian) as a remedial measure, and advised
Victoria to devote herself to a younger brother she had, in the same
way that she had attended to her own brother Charles in his infancy,
as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure."
Allsop, Coleridge's friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a
young man overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his
prospects, he found Charles and Mary Lamb not wanting in the hour of
need. "I have a clear recollection," says he, "of Miss Lamb's
addressing me in a tone which acted at once as a solace and support,
and after as a stimulus, to which I owe more perhaps than to the more
extended arguments of all others."
On the whole Mary was a silent woman. It was her forte rather to
enable others to talk their best by the charm of an earnest, speaking
countenance and a responsive manner; and there are but few instances
in which any of her words have been preserved. In that memorable
conversation at Lamb's table on "Persons one would like to have seen,"
reported by Hazlitt, when it was a question of women, "I should like
vastly to have seen Ninon de L'Enclos," said Mary. When Queen
Caroline's trial was pending and her character and conduct the topic
in every mouth, Mary said she did not see that it made much difference
whether the Queen was what they called guilty or not--meaning,
probably, that the stream was so plainly muddy at the fountain-head it
was idle to enquire what ill places it had passed through in its
course. Or else, perhaps, that, either way, the King's conduct was
equally odious.
The last observation of hers I can find recorded, is at first sight,
unlike herself:--"How stupid old people are!" It was that
unimaginative incapacity to sympathise with the young, so alien to her
own nature, no doubt, which provoked the remark. Of her readiness to
help all that came within her reach there is a side-glimpse in some
letters of Lamb's,--the latest to see the light,--which come, as other
interesting contributions to the knowledge of Lamb's writings have
done (notably those of the late Mr. Babson), from over the Atlantic.
In _The Century_ Magazine for September 1882 are seven letters to John
Howard Payne, an American playwright, whom Lamb was endeavouring to
help in his but partially successful struggle to earn a livelihood by
means of adaptations for the stage in London and Paris. Mrs.
Cowden-Clarke speaks of this Mr. Payne as the acquaintance whom Mary
Lamb, "ever thoughtful to procure a pleasure for young people," had
asked to call and see the little Victoria, then at school at Boulogne,
on his way to Paris. He proved a good friend to Mary herself during
that trip to France which, with a courage amounting to rashness, she
and Charles undertook in the summer of 1822.
"I went to call on the Lambs to take leave, they setting out for
France next morning," writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, June 17th.
"I gave Miss Lamb a letter for Miss Williams, to whom I sent a copy of
_Mrs. Leicester's School_. The Lambs have a Frenchman as their
companion and Miss Lamb's nurse, in case she should be ill. Lamb was
in high spirits; his sister rather nervous."
The privation of sleep entailed in such a journey combined with the
excitement, produced its inevitable result and Mary was taken with one
of her severest attacks in the _diligence_ on the way to Amiens.
There, happily, they seem to have found Mr. Payne, who assisted
Charles to make the necessary arrangements for her remaining under
proper care till the return of reason, and then he went on to Paris,
where he stayed with the Kennys, who thought him dull and out of
sorts, as well he might be. Two months afterwards we hear of Mary as
being in Paris. Charles, his holiday over, had been obliged to return
to England.
"Mary Lamb has begged me to give her a day or two," says Crabb
Robinson. "She comes to Paris this evening, and stays here a week. Her
only male friend is a Mr. Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his
kindness and attentions to Charles. He is the author of _Brutus_, and
has a good face."
It was in the following year that most of the letters to Mr. Payne,
published in the _Century_, were written. They disclose Mary and her
brother zealous to repay one good turn with another by watching the
success of his dramatic efforts and endeavouring to negociate
favourably for him with actors and managers. "_Ali Pacha_ will do. I
sent my sister the first night, not having been able to go myself, and
her report of its effect was most favourable.... My love to my little
wife at Versailles, and to her dear mother.... I have no mornings (my
day begins at 5 p.m.) to transact business in, or talents for it, so I
employ Mary, who has seen Robertson, who says that the piece which is
to be operafied was sent to you six weeks since, &c. &c. Mary says you
must write more _showable_ letters about these matters, for with all
our trouble of crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn to
th' other, and folding down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious
epithet into a corner, she can hardly communicate their contents
without offence. What, man, put less gall in your ink, or write me a
biting tragedy!"...
The piece which was sent to Mr. Payne in Paris to be "operafied" was
probably _Clari, the Maid of Milan_. Bishop wrote or adapted the
music: it still keeps possession of the stage and contains "Home sweet
Home," which plaintive, well-worn ditty earned for its writer among
his friends the title of the "Homeless Poet of Home." He ended his
days as American Consul at Tunis.
This year's holiday (1823), spent at Hastings, was one of unalloyed
pleasure and refreshment. "I have given up my soul to walking," Lamb
writes. "There are spots, inland bays, &c., which realise the notions
of Juan Fernandez. The best thing I lit upon, by accident, was a small
country church (by whom or when built unknown), standing bare and
single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of
habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages diverging from it
through beautiful woods to so many farm-houses. There it stands, like
the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of,
nothing but birds for its congregation; or, like a hermit's oratory
(the hermit dead), or a mausoleum; its effect singularly impressive,
like a church found in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home
image.... I am a long time reconciling to town after one of these
excursions. Home is become strange, and will remain so yet awhile;
home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always resents absence; I
know its cordial looks will return, but they are slow in clearing up."
The "cordial looks," however, of the Russell Street home never did
return. The plan of the double lodgings, there and at Dalston, was a
device of double discomforts; the more so as "at my town lodgings," he
afterwards confesses to Bernard Barton, "the mistress was always
quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication the whole
family were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one,
a most beautiful girl, lamed for life), father beating sons and
daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him fairly down,
a scene I never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by the
unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, though my morals
could not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the
issue the house was quieter for a day or so than I had ever known." It
was time, indeed, for brother and sister to have a house of their own
over their heads, means now amply sufficing.
A few weeks after their return Lamb took Colebrook Cottage, at
Islington. It was detached, faced the New River, had six good rooms,
and a spacious garden behind. "You enter without passage," he writes,
"into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old
books, and above is a lightsome drawing-room, full of choice prints. I
feel like a great lord, never having had a house before."
A new acquaintance, a man much after Lamb's heart, at whose table he
and Mary were, in the closing years of his life, more frequent guests
than at any other--"Mr. Carey, the Dante man"--was added to their list
this year. "He is a model of a country parson, lean (as a curate ought
to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of Church dogmas, quite a
different man from Southey," says Lamb of him. "Quite a different man
from Southey" had a peculiar sting in it at this moment, for Southey
had just struck a blow at _Elia_ in the _Quarterly_, as unjust in
purport as it was odious in manner,--detraction in the guise of
praise. Lamb answered him this very autumn in the _London Magazine_: a
noble answer it is, which seems to have awakened something like
compunction in Southey's exemplary but pharisaic soul. At all events
he made overtures for a reconciliation, which so touched Lamb's
generous heart, he was instantly ready to take blame upon himself for
having written the letter. "I shall be ashamed to see you, and my
sister, though innocent, still more so," he says, "for the folly was
done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My
guardian angel was absent at that time." By which token we know that
Mary did not escape the usual sad effects of change and fatigue in the
removal to Colebrook Cottage.
Means were easy, home comfortable now; but many a wistful backward
glance did brother and sister cast to the days of early struggle, with
their fuller life, keener pleasures, and better health. It was not
long after they were settled in Colebrook Cottage that they opened
their hearts on this theme in that beautiful essay by Elia called _Old
China_--Wordsworth's favourite,--in which Charles, for once, made
himself Mary's--or as he calls her Cousin Bridget's--mouthpiece.
Whilst sipping tea out of "a set of extraordinary blue china, a recent
purchase,"... writes Elia, "I could not help remarking how favourable
circumstances had been to us of late years that we could afford to
please the eye, sometimes, with trifles of this sort; when a passing
sentiment seemed to overshade the brow of my companion;--I am quick at
detecting these summer clouds in Bridget.
"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said; 'when we were
not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was
a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which I am sure
we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase now that
you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.
When we coveted a cheap luxury (and O how much ado I had to get you to
consent in those times!), we were used to have a debate two or three
days before, and to weigh the _for_ and _against_, and think what we
might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon that should
be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the
money that we paid for it.
"'Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you till
all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all
because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we
eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase,
and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of
the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you
should be too late,--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling
opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting
bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures,--and when
you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome,--and when you
presented it to me,--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it
(_collating_, you called it),--and while I was repairing some of the
loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be
left till daybreak,--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can
those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to
keep brushed since we have become rich and finical, give you half the
honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn suit,
your old corbeau, for four or five weeks longer than you should have
done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or
sixteen shillings, was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which
you had lavished on the old folio? Now you can afford to buy any book
that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any
nice old purchases now.
"'When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less
number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo which we christened
the "Lady Blanch," when you looked at the purchase and thought of the
money, and thought of the money and looked again at the picture--was
there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now you have nothing to do but
to walk into Colnaghi's and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet, do
you?
"'Then do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's
Bar, and Waltham when we had a holiday--holidays and all other fun are
gone now we are rich--and the little hand-basket in which I used to
deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad,--and how you
would pry about at noontide for some decent house where we might go in
and produce our store--only paying for the ale that you must call
for--and speculated upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she
was likely to allow us a table-cloth, and wish for such another honest
hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks
of the Lea when he went a-fishing--and sometimes they would prove
obliging enough and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us--but
we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain
food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we
go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we _ride_ part of
the way, and go into a fine inn and order the best of dinners, never
debating the expense--which after all never has half the relish of
those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain
usage and a precarious welcome.
"'You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you
remember where it was we used to sit when we saw the Battle of Hexham,
and the Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the
Children in the Wood,--when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to
sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery, where
you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me, and more
strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me--and the
pleasure was the better for a little shame--and when the curtain drew
up what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where
we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden or with
Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was
the best place of all for enjoying a play socially,--that the relish
of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of
going,--that the company we met there, not being in general readers of
plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was
going on on the stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm
which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we
consoled our pride then--and I appeal to you whether as a woman I met
generally with less attention and accommodation than I have done since
in more expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed, and
the crowding up those inconvenient stair-cases was bad enough--but
there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as
great an extent as we ever found in the other passages--and how a
little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play
afterwards! Now we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see,
you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well
enough then--but sight and all I think is gone with our poverty.
"'There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite
common--in the first dish of peas while they were yet dear--to have
them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we
were to treat ourselves now--that is to have dainties a little above
our means--it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more
that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that
makes what I call a treat--when two people living together as we have
done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury which both
like, while each apologises and is willing to take both halves of the
blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of
themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to
make much of others. But now--what I mean by the word--we never do
make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the
veriest poor of all, but persons, as we were, just above poverty.
"'I know what you were going to say--that it is mighty pleasant at the
end of the year to make all meet,--and much ado we used to have every
thirty-first night of December to account for our exceedings--many a
long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving
to make it out how we had spent so much--or that we had not spent so
much--or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year--and
still we found our slender capital decreasing; but then, betwixt ways
and projects and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of
curtailing this charge and doing without that for the future--and the
hope that youth brings and laughing spirits (in which you were never
poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with
"lusty brimmers" (as you used to quote it out of _hearty, cheerful Mr.
Cotton_, as you called him) we used to "welcome in the coming guest."
Now we have no reckonings at all at the end of the old year--no
flattering promises about the new year doing better for us.'
"Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she
gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could
not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear
imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor--hundred
pounds a year. 'It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we
were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the
excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should
not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with as we grew
up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and
knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to
each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now
complain of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the
youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten--with us are long
since passed away. Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry
supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride
where we formerly walked; live better and lie softer--and we shall be
wise to do so--than we had means to do in those good old days you
speak of. Yet could those days return--could you and I once more walk
our thirty miles a day,--could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be
young, and you and I be young again to see them,--could the good old
one-shilling gallery days return--they are dreams, my cousin, now--but
could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our
well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa, be once more
struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about and
squeezed and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery
scramblers,--could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours,
and the delicious '_Thank God we are safe_,' which always followed
when the topmost stair conquered let in the first light of the whole
cheerful theatre down beneath us--I know not the fathom-line that ever
touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in
than Croesus had, or the great Jew R. is supposed to have, to purchase
it."...
These fire-side confidences between brother and sister bring back, in
all the warmth and fulness of life, that past mid which the biographer
has been groping and listening to echoes.