Lamb's Ill-health.--Retirement from the India House, and subsequent
Illness.--Letter from Mary to Lady Stoddart.--Colebrook Cottage
left.--Mary's constant Attacks.--Home given up.--Board with the
Westwoods.--Death of Hazlitt.--Removal to Edmonton.--Marriage of Emma
Isola.--Mary's sudden Recovery.--Ill again.--Death of Coleridge.--Death
of Charles.--Mary's Last Days and Death.
1824-47.--Æt. 60-83.
The year 1824 was one of the best Mary ever enjoyed. Alas! it was not
the precursor of others like it, but rather a farewell gleam before
the clouds gathered up thicker and thicker till the light of reason
was permanently obscured. In November Charles wrote to Miss
Hutchinson: "We had promised our dear friends the Monkhouses"
[relatives of Mrs. Wordsworth]--"promised ourselves, rather--a visit
to them at Ramsgate; but I thought it best, and Mary seemed to have it
at heart too, not to go far from home these last holidays. It is
connected with a sense of unsettlement, and secretly I know she hoped
that such abstinence would be friendly to her health. She certainly
has escaped her sad yearly visitation, whether in consequence of it,
or of faith in it, and we have to be thankful for a good 1824, To get
such a notion in our heads may go a great way another year. Not that
we quite confined ourselves; but, assuming Islington to be
head-quarters, we made timid flights to Ware, Watford, &c., to try how
trouts tasted, for a night out or so, not long enough to make the
sense of change oppressive, but sufficient to scour the rust of home."
With Lamb it was quite otherwise. The letters of this year show that
health and spirits were flagging sorely. He had, ever since 1820, been
working at high pressure; producing in steady, rapid succession, his
matchless _Essays_ in the _London Magazine_, and this at the end of a
long day's office work. His delicate, nervous organisation could not
fail to suffer from the continued strain; not to mention the ever
present and more terrible one of his sister's health.
At last his looks attracted the notice of one of his chiefs, and it
was intimated that a resignation might be accepted; as it was after
some anxious delays; and a provision for Mary, if she survived, was
guaranteed in addition to his comfortable pension. The sense of
freedom was almost overwhelming. "Mary wakes every morning with an
obscure feeling that some good has happened to us," he writes. "Leigh
Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock of
their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames; I
eat, drink, and sleep as sound as ever."
A reaction did come, however. Lamb continued pretty well through the
spring, but in the summer he was prostrated by a severe attack of
nervous fever. In July he wrote to Bernard Barton: "My nervous attack
has so unfitted me that I have not courage to sit down to a letter. My
poor pittance in the _London_ you will see is drawn from my sickness"
(_The Convalescent_, which appeared July 1825).
One more glimpse of Mary in a letter from her own hand. Again the
whole summer was being spent in lodgings at Enfield, whence Mary wrote
to congratulate her old friend Mrs., now Lady, Stoddart--her husband
having become Chief Justice of Malta--on the marriage of a daughter:--
"August 9, 1827.
"MY DEAR LADY-FRIEND,--My brother called at our empty cottage
[Colebrook] yesterday, and found the cards of your son, and his friend
Mr. Hine, under the door; which has brought to my mind that I am in
danger of losing this post, as I did the last, being at that time in a
confused state of mind--for at that time we were talking of leaving,
and persuading ourselves that we were intending to leave town and all
our friends, and sit down for ever, solitary and forgotten here....
Here we are, and we have locked up our house, and left it to take care
of itself; but, at present, we do not design to extend our rural life
beyond Michaelmas. Your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the
good news contained in it was already known to me. Accept my warmest
congratulations, though they come a little of the latest. In my next I
may probably have to hail you grand-mama, or to felicitate you on the
nuptials of pretty Mary who, whatever the beaux of Malta may think of
her, I can only remember her round shining face, and her 'O William!
dear William!' when we visited her the other day at school. Present my
love and best wishes--a long and happy married life to dear
Isabella--I love to call her Isabella; but in truth, having left your
other letter in town, I recollect no other name she has. The same love
and the same wishes--_in futuro_--to my friend Mary. Tell her that her
'dear William' grows taller, and improves in manly looks and man-like
behaviour every time I see him. What is Henry about? and what should
one wish for him? If he be in search of a wife, I will send him out
Emma Isola.
"You remember Emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball?
She is now with us; and I am moving heaven and earth, that is to say,
I am pressing the matter upon all the very few friends I have that are
likely to assist me in such a case, to get her into a family as
governess; and Charles and I do little else here than teach her
something or other all day long.
"We are striving to put enough Latin into her to enable her to begin
to teach it to young learners. So much for Emma--for you are so
fearfully far away that I fear it is useless to implore your patronage
for her....
"I expect a pacquet of manuscript from you. You promised me the office
of negociating with booksellers and so forth for your next work."
[Lady Stoddart published several tales under the name of Blackford.]
"Is it in good forwardness? Or do you grow rich and indolent now? It
is not surprising that your Maltese story should find its way into
Malta; but I was highly pleased with the idea of your pleasant
surprise at the sight of it. I took a large sheet of paper, in order
to leave Charles room to add something more worth reading than my poor
mite. May we all meet again once more."
It was to escape the "dear weariness" of incessant friendly visitors,
which they were now less than ever able to bear, that they had taken
refuge in the Enfield lodging.
"We have been here near three months, and shall stay two more if people
will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village," Lamb
writes to Bernard Barton in August.
At the end of that time they decided to return to Colebrook Cottage no
more, but to take a house at Enfield. The actual process of taking it
was witnessed by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose
memory it left a lively picture. "Leaning idly out of a window, I saw
a group of three issuing from the 'gambogy-looking' cottage close at
hand,--a slim, middle-aged man, in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments,
a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap,
and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog (Hood's
immortal 'Dash'), holding a board with 'This House to Let' on it in
his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent, and that was
his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.
"I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours," continues
the writer of this pleasant reminiscence--Mr. Westwood, in _Notes and
Queries_, vol. x.--"who let me loose in his library.... My heart
yearns even now to those old books. Their faces seem all familiar to
me, even their patches and blotches--the work of a wizened old cobbler
hard by--for little wotted Lamb of Roger Parkes and Charles Lewises. A
cobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the restoration the
better.... When any notable visitors made their appearance at the
cottage, Mary Lamb's benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to
summon me out, and I was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of
their sitting-room, half hid in some great man's shadow.
"Of the discourse of these _dii majores_ I have no recollection now;
but the faces of some of them I can still partially recall. Hazlitt's
face, for instance, keen and aggressive, with eyes that flashed out
epigram. Tom Hood's, a methodist parson's face, not a ripple breaking
the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a pun, and every pun
roused roars of laughter. Leigh Hunt's, parcel genial, parcel
democratic, with as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from
Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly [the little Barbara S. of _Elia_], plain but
engaging, the most unprofessional of actresses and unspoiled of women;
the bloom of the child on her cheek undefaced by the rouge, to speak
in metaphors. She was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb's guests.
Wordsworth's, farmerish and respectable, but with something of the
great poet occasionally breaking out, and glorifying forehead and
eyes...."
Mary did not escape her usual seizure. "You will understand my
silence," writes Lamb to his Quaker friend, "when I tell you that my
sister, on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at
Enfield, was surprised with an attack of one of her sad long
illnesses, which deprive me of her society, though not of her
domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. I see her, but it
does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable
house, with everything most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a
wilderness. The books, prints, &c. are come here, and the New River
came down with us. The familiar prints, the busts, the Milton, seem
scarce to have changed their rooms. One of her last observations was,
'How frightfully like this is to our room at Islington,'--our upstair
room she meant. We have tried quiet here for four months, and I will
answer for the comfort of it enduring." And again, later: "I have
scarce spirits to write. Nine weeks are completed, and Mary does not
get any better. It is perfectly exhausting. Enfield and everything is
very gloomy. But for long experience, I should fear her ever getting
well."
She did get "pretty well and comfortable again" before the year was
quite out, but it did not last long. Times grew sadder and sadder for
the faithful brother. There are two long, oft-quoted letters to
Bernard Barton, written in July 1829, which who has ever read without
a pang?
"My sister is again taken ill," he says, "and I am obliged to remove
her out of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can hope to have
her again. I have been very desolate indeed. My loneliness is a little
abated by our young friend Emma having just come here for her
holidays, and a school-fellow of hers that was with her. Still the
house is not the same, though she is the same. Mary had been pleasing
herself with the prospect of seeing her at this time; and with all
their company, the house feels at times a frightful solitude.... But
town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was.... I
was frightfully convinced of this as I passed houses and places--empty
caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I
cared for are in graves or dispersed.... Less than a month I hope will
bring home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than
ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing
me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old feelings will
come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of picquet
again. But 'tis a tedious cut out of a life of fifty-four to lose
twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. And, to make me more
alone, our ill-tempered maid is gone [Becky] who, with all her airs,
was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days. The young
thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is
nothing; and I have no one here to talk over old matters with.
Scolding and quarrelling have something of familiarity and a community
of interest; they imply acquaintance; they are of resentment which is
of the family of dearness. Well, I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the
present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to
alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let
you, and think that you are not quite alone as I am."
To the friends who came to see him he made no complaints, nor showed a
sad countenance; but it was hard that he might not relieve his drear
solitude by the sights and sounds of beloved London. "O never let the
lying poets be believed," he writes to Wordsworth, "who 'tice men from
the cheerful haunts of streets; or think they mean it not of a country
village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude,
or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers; but to have a little
teazing image of a town about one; country folks that do not look like
country folks; shops two yards square; half-a-dozen apples and two
penn'orth of over-looked ginger-bread for the lofty fruiterers of
Oxford Street; and for the immortal book and print stalls, a
circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a
last year's valentine.... The very blackguards here are degenerate;
the topping gentry, stock-brokers; the passengers too many to insure
your quiet or let you go about whistling or gaping, too few to be the
fine, indifferent pageants of Fleet Street.... A garden was the
primitive prison till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness,
luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh,
Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, satires, epigrams,
puns,--these all came in on the town part and the thither side of
innocence...." In the same letter he announces that they have been
obliged to give up home altogether, and have "taken a farewell of the
pompous, troublesome trifle called house-keeping, and settled down
into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the
Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with
our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with
the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her
scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save
as spectators of the pageant. We are fed, we know not how; quietists,
confiding ravens.... Mary must squeeze out a line _propria manu_, but
indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter-writing
for a long interval. 'Twill please you all to hear that, though I fret
like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than
they have been for some time past. She is absolutely three years and a
half younger since we adopted this boarding plan!... Under this roof I
ought now to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition, more
delightful, tells me I might yet be a Londoner! Well, if ever we do
move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture
has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the
tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two
left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go
out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless."
Now that Mary was recovered they did venture to try once more the
experiment of London lodgings at 24 Southampton Buildings, Holborn,
where Hazlitt had often stayed. But the result was worse even than
could have been anticipated. May 12, 1830, Lamb writes: "I have
brought my sister to Enfield, being sure she had no hope of recovery
in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond any example. I
almost fear whether she has strength, at her time of life, ever to get
out of it. Here she must be nursed and neither see nor hear of
anything in the world out of her sick chamber. The mere hearing that
Southey had called at our lodgings totally upset her. Pray see him or
hear of him at Mr. Rickman's and excuse my not writing to him. I dare
not write or receive a letter in her presence."
Another old friend, the one whom, next to Coleridge, Wordsworth and
Manning, Lamb valued most, died this year. Hazlitt's strength had been
for some time declining; and during the summer of 1830 he lay at his
lodgings, 6 Frith Street, Soho, languishing in what was to prove his
death illness, though he was but fifty-two; his mind clear and active
as ever, looking back, as he said, upon his past life which 'seemed as
if he had slept it out in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of
knowledge, where he had fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures and
only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet or the noises of
the throng below.' 'I have had a happy life,' were his last words.
Unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of
friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to
humanity in the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or
beautiful, or powerful in literature, in art, in heroic achievement.
His ideas, as he said of himself, were "of so sinewy a character that
they were in the nature of realities" to him. Lamb was by his
death-bed that 18th of September.
Godwin still lived, but there seems to have been little intercourse
between the old friends. Manning was often away travelling on the
Continent. Martin Burney maintained his place 'on the top scale of the
Lambs' friendship ladder, on which an angel or two were still
climbing, and some, alas! descending,' and oftenest enlivened the
solitude of Enfield. He "is as good and as odd as ever," writes
Charles to Mrs. Hazlitt. "We had a dispute about the word 'heir,'
which I contended was pronounced like 'air.' He said that might be in
common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the 'Heir-at-Law,'
a comedy, but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a
full aspiration and to say _Hayer_; he thought it might even vitiate a
cause if a counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion he 'would
consult Serjeant Wilde'--who gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth
into the water; sometimes into the fire. He came down here and
insisted on reading Virgil's 'Eneid' all through with me (which he
did), because a Counsel must know Latin. Another time he read out all
the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic
in a Court of Justice. A third time he would carve a fowl, which he
did very ill-favouredly, because 'we did not know how indispensable it
was for a barrister to do all those things well. Those little things
were of more consequence than we supposed.' So he goes on, harassing
about the way to prosperity and losing it; with a long head, but
somewhat a wrong one--harum-scarum. Why does not his guardian angel
look to him? He deserves one; may-be he has tired him out."
A cheerful glimpse of the brother and sister occurs now and then in
the Diary of their old friend, Crabb Robinson, in these days when the
dark times were so long and the bright intervals so short and far
between. March 1832 he writes:--"I walked to Enfield and found the
Lambs in excellent state,--not in high health, but, what is far
better, quiet and cheerful. I had a very pleasant evening at whist.
Lamb was very chatty and altogether as I could wish." And again in
July, "... reached Lamb at the lucky moment before tea. After tea Lamb
and I took a pleasant walk together. He was in excellent health and
tolerable spirits, and was to-night quite eloquent in praise of Miss
Isola. He says she is the most sensible girl and the best female
talker he knows ... he is teaching her Italian without knowing the
language himself." Two months later the same friend took Walter Savage
Landor to pay them a visit. "We had scarcely an hour to chat with
them, but it was enough to make Landor express himself delighted with
the person of Mary Lamb and pleased with the conversation of Charles
Lamb, though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was
quite silent."
Scarcely ever did Charles leave home for many hours together when Mary
was there to brighten it; not even for the temptation of seeing the
Wordsworths or Coleridge. "I want to see the Wordsworths," he writes,
"but I do not much like to be all night away. It is dull enough to be
here together, but it is duller to leave Mary; in short, it is
painful"; and to Coleridge, who had been hurt by the long interval
since he had seen them, Lamb writes:--"Not an unkind thought has
passed in my brain about you; but I have been wofully neglectful of
you.... old loves to and hope of kind looks from the Gillmans when I
come. If ever you thought an offence, much more wrote it against me,
it must have been in the times of Noah and the great waters swept it
away. Mary's most kind love, and may be a wrong prophet of your
bodings! here she is crying for mere love over your letter. I wring
out less but not sincerer showers."
The spring of 1833 brought to Charles and Mary only the return of dark
days. Lamb writes to Wordsworth:--
"Your letter, save in what respects your dear sister's health, cheered
me in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly.
The last was three months followed by two of depression most dreadful.
I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing: nice little durations
of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration,--shocking as
they were then to me. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and
the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the
next shock. With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she
should no longer live with me and be fluttered with continual
removals; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. Walden's and his wife
[at Edmonton], who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and
board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of
her: alas! I too often hear her. _Sunt lachrymæ rerum!_ and you and I
must bear it.
"To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance has happened (_cujus
pars magna fui_), and which at another crisis I should have more
rejoiced in. I am about to lose my old and only walk companion, whose
mirthful spirits were the 'youth of our house,'--Emma Isola. I have
her here now for a little while, but she is too nervous properly to be
under such a roof, so she will make short visits--be no more an
inmate. With my perfect approval and more than concurrence she is to
be wedded to Moxon at the end of August. So 'perish the roses and the
flowers!'--how is it?
"Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods and I
am with attentive people and younger. I am three or four miles nearer
the great city; coaches half price less and going always, of which I
will avail myself. I have few friends left there, one or two, though,
most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly,
though not one known of the latter were remaining.... I am feeble but
cheerful in this my genial hot weather. Walked sixteen miles
yesterday. I can't read much in summer-time."
There was no sense of being "pulled up by the roots" now in these
removals. Lamb had and could have no home since she who had been its
chief pride was in perpetual banishment from him and from herself. The
following notelet which Talfourd, in his abundance, probably did not
think worth publishing, at any rate shows with mournful significance
how bitter were his recollections of Enfield, to which they had gone
full of hope. It was written to Mr. Gillman's eldest son, a young
clergyman, desirous of the incumbency of Enfield:--
"By a strange occurrence we have quitted Enfield _for ever!_ Oh! the
happy eternity! Who is Vicar or Lecturer for that detestable place
concerns us not. But Asbury, surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to
get you a Mover and Seconder, and you may use my name freely to him.
Except him and Dr. Creswell, I have no respectable acquaintance in the
dreary village. At least my friends are all in the _public_ line, and
it might not suit to have it moved at a special vestry by John Gage at
the Crown and Horseshoe, licensed victualler, and seconded by Joseph
Horner of the Green Dragon, ditto, that the Rev. J. G. is a fit person
to be Lecturer, &c.
"My dear James, I wish you all success, but am too full of my own
emancipation almost to congratulate anyone else."
Miss Isola's wedding-day came, and still Mary's mind was under
eclipse; but the announcement of the actual event restored her as by
magic; and here is her own letter of congratulation to the bride and
bridegroom,--the last from her hand:--
"MY DEAR EMMA AND EDWARD MOXON,
"Accept my sincere congratulations and imagine more good wishes than
my weak nerves will let me put into good, set words. The dreary blank
of _unanswered questions_ which I ventured to ask in vain, was cleared
up on the wedding-day by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and, with a
total change of countenance, begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs.
Moxon's health. It restored me from that moment, as if by an electric
shock, to the entire possession of my senses. I never felt so calm and
quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were
wiped from my eyes and all care from my heart."
To which beautiful last words Charles adds:--
"DEARS AGAIN--Your letter interrupted a seventeenth game at picquet
which _we_ were having after walking to Wright's and purchasing shoes.
We pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon.
Never was such a calm or such a recovery. 'Tis her own words
undictated."
Not Tasso only was attacked, but even Dante. "You will be amused to
hear," he tells Carey, "that my sister and I have, with the aid of
Emma, scrambled through the _Inferno_ by the blessed furtherance of
your polar-star translation. I think we scarce left anything
un-made-out. But our partner has left us and we have not yet resumed.
Mary's chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to
you."
The year 1834, the last of Lamb's life, opened gloomily. Early in
February was written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his
utterances concerning Mary. With the exception of a brief, mournful
allusion to her in his latest letter to Wordsworth these were his last
written words about her, and they breathe the same tenderness and
unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long struggle and
endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. The letter is
to Miss Fryer, an old school-fellow of Emma Isola:--"Your letter found
me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover
Street [the Moxons]. I see them pretty often. In one word, be less
uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the
depths of desolation as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon
me. Your kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no
new thing for me to be left to my sister. When she is not violent her
rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world.
Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one
can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone
over it. I could be nowhere happier than under the same roof with her.
Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may so
call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of
names and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and
thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from
early girlhood to her coming of age principally live again (every
important thing and every trifle) in her brain, with the vividness of
real presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without
intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name
after name to the Waldens, as a dream, sense and nonsense, truth and
errors huddled together, a medley between inspiration and possession.
What things we are! I know you will bear with me talking of things. It
seems to ease me, for I have nobody to tell these things to now...."
A week later was written that last little letter to Wordsworth (the
reader will recognize Louisa Martin--Monkey--so prettily described in
Lamb's first letter to Hazlitt):--"I write from a house of mourning.
The oldest and best friends I have left are in trouble. A branch of
them (and they of the best stock of God's creatures, I believe) is
establishing a school at Carlisle. Her name is Louisa Martin. For
thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour I would
stake my soul. Oh! if you could recommend her, how would I love
you--if I could love you better! Pray, pray recommend her. She is as
good a human creature--next to my sister, perhaps, the most exemplary
female I ever knew. Moxon tells me you would like a letter from me;
you shall have one. _This_ I cannot mingle up with any nonsense which
you usually tolerate from C. Lamb. Poor Mary is ill again, after a
short, lucid interval of four or five months. In short, I may call her
half dead to me. Good you are to me. Yours, with fervour of
friendship, for ever."
The dearest friend of all, Coleridge, long in declining health--the
"hooded eagle, flagging wearily," was lying this spring and summer in
his last painful illness--heart disease chiefly, but complicated with
other sources of suffering--borne with heroic patience. Thoughts of
his youth came to him, he said, 'like breezes from the Spice islands;'
and under the title of that poem written in the glorious Nether Stowey
days when Charles was his guest,--_This Lime-tree Bower my
Prison_,--he wrote a little while before he died:--
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB,
Dear to my heart, yea, as it were _my heart_.
S. T. C. Æt. 63, 1834.
1797
1834
----
37 years!
He drew his last breath on the 25th of July. At first Lamb seemed
wholly unable to grasp the fact that he was gone. "Coleridge is dead!"
he murmured continually, as if to convince himself. He 'grieved that
he could not grieve.' "But since," he wrote in that beautiful memorial
of his friend--the last fragment shaped by his hand--"but since, I
feel how great a part of me he was. His great and dear spirit haunts
me.... He was my fifty-year old friend without a dissension. Never saw
I his likeness, nor probably the world can see it again. I seem to
love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love
the faithful Gillman's more than while they exercised their virtues
towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a
chapel."
A month after this was written Charles Lamb followed his friend. A
seemingly slight accident, a fall which wounded his face, brought on
erysipelas, and he sank rapidly, dying the 27th December 1834. For
once, Mary's affliction befriended her. Though her mind was not wholly
obscured at the time, for she was able to show the spot in Edmonton
churchyard where her brother had wished to be buried, yet it was so
far deadened that she was unable to comprehend what had befallen her;
and thus she remained for nearly a year.
None thought of Mary with tenderer sympathy than Landor, or strove
with more sincerity to offer "consolation to the finest genius that
ever descended on the heart of woman," as he fervently described her.
"When I first heard of the loss that all his friends, and many that
never were his friends, sustained in him," he wrote to Crabb Robinson,
"no thought took possession of my mind except the anguish of his
sister. That very night, before I closed my eyes, I composed this:--
TO THE SISTER OF CHARLES LAMB.
Comfort thee, O thou mourner! yet awhile
Again shall Elia's smile
Refresh thy heart, whose heart can ache no more.
What is it we deplore?
He leaves behind him, freed from grief and years,
Far worthier things than tears,
The love of friends without a single foe;
Unequalled lot below!
His gentle soul, his genius, these are thine;
Shalt thou for these repine?
He may have left the lowly walks of men;
Left them he has: what then?
Are not his footsteps followed by the eyes
Of all the good and wise?
Though the warm day is over, yet they seek
Upon the lofty peak
Of his pure mind, the roseate light that glows
O'er death's perennial snows.
Behold him! From the spirits of the blest
He speaks: he bids thee rest.
About a month after her brother's death, their faithful old friend,
Crabb Robinson, went to see Mary. "She was neither violent nor
unhappy," he wrote in his diary, "nor was she entirely without sense.
She was, however, out of her mind, as the expression is, but she could
combine ideas, though imperfectly. On my going into the room where she
was sitting with Mr. Walden, she exclaimed, with great vivacity, 'Oh!
here's _Crabby_.' She gave me her hand with great cordiality, and
said, 'Now this is very kind--not merely good-natured, but very, very
kind to come and see me in my affliction.' And then she ran on about
the unhappy, insane family of my old friend ----. Her mind seemed to
turn to subjects connected with insanity as well as to her brother's
death. She spoke of Charles, of his birth, and said that he was a
weakly but very pretty child."
In a year's time she was herself once more; calm, even cheerful; able,
now and then, to meet old friends at the Moxons'. She refused to leave
Edmonton. "_He_ was there asleep in the old churchyard, beneath the
turf near which they had stood together, and had selected for a
resting-place; to this spot she used, when well, to stroll out
mournfully in the evening, and to this spot she would contrive to lead
any friend who came in summer evenings to drink tea, and went out with
her afterwards for a walk." Out of very love she was content to be the
one left alone; and found a truth in Wordsworth's beautiful saying,
that "a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation, in course of
time, springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkle
the turf."
Lucid intervals continued, for a few years longer, to alternate with
ever-lengthening periods of darkness. That mysterious brain was not
even yet wholly wrecked by the eighty years of storms that had broken
over it. Even when the mind seemed gone the heart kept some of its
fine instincts. She learned to bear her solitude very patiently, and
was gentle and kind always. Towards 1840 her friends persuaded her to
remove to Alpha Road, St. John's Wood, that she might be nearer to
them. Thirteen years she survived her brother, and then was laid in
the same grave with him at Edmonton, May 28th, 1847; a scanty remnant
of the old friends gathering round,--"Martin Burney refusing to be
comforted."
Coleridge looked upon Lamb "as one hovering between heaven and earth,
neither hoping much nor fearing anything." Or, as he himself once,
with infinite sweetness, put it, "Poor Elia does not pretend to so
very clear revelations of a future state of being. He stumbles about
dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for
this life, and is too thankful indeed for certain relationships lent
him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." Of
Mary it may be said that she hoped all things and feared
nothing,--wisest, noblest attitude of the human soul toward the
Unknown.
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
_Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb._ _Edited by Percy
Fitzgerald, M.A., F.S.A._ 1876.
_The Works of Charles Lamb._ _Edited by Charles Kent_ [in which, for
the first time, the dates and original mode of publication were
affixed to the Essays, &c.]. 1878.
_Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb._ _Edited by Richard
Herne Shepherd._ 1878.
_Mrs. Leicester's School, by Charles and Mary Lamb._
_Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb._ 1807.
_Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Talfourd._ 1848.
_Charles Lamb: A Memoir, by Barry Cornwall._ 1866.
_Mary and Charles Lamb, by W. Carew Hazlitt._ 1874.
_My Friends and Acquaintance, by P. G. Patmore._ 1854.
_Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of Coleridge, by Thomas
Allsop._ Third edition. 1864.
_Early Recollections of Coleridge, by J. Cottle._ 1837.
_Biographia Literaria, by Coleridge._ Second edition. 1847.
_Life of Coleridge, by Gillman._ Vol. I. 1838.
_Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge._ _Edited by her Daughter._
1873.
_Life of Wordsworth, by Rev. Dr. C. Wordsworth._ 1851.
_A Chronological List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt,
preceded by an Essay on Lamb, and List of his Works, by Alex. Ireland;
printed for private circulation._ (The copy used contains many MS.
additions by the Author.) 1868.
_Recollections of Writers, by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke._ 1878.
_Six Life Studies of Famous Women, by M. Betham Edwards._ 1880.
_Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb-Robinson._
_Edited by Dr. Sadler._ 1869.
_Memoir of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt._ 1867.
_Spirit of the Age._ & _Table Talk._ by _Hazlitt._ 1825, 1826.
_Autobiographical Sketches._ & _Lakes and Lake Poets._ by _De
Quincey._ 1863.
_William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, by Kegan
Paul._ 1876.
LONDON
PRINTED BY W. H. ALLEN AND CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE.
Transcriber's note:
Contemporary spellings, old word forms, and punctuation rules have
been retained, even when inconsistent. The List of Authorities has
been moved to the end of the volume.