Mary Lamb. Gilchrist Anne Burrows

or deliberate in speech. In after life, there was another sad similarity for Dorothy's reason, too, was in the end over-clouded. Coleridge has described her as she then was: "She is a woman indeed," said he, "in mind, I mean, and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her manners are simple, ardent, and impressive. In every motion her innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say 'guilt was a thing impossible with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in minute observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer."

      An accident had lamed Coleridge the very morning after Lamb's arrival, so that he was unable to share his friends' walks. He turned his imprisonment to golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us, as in a still lake, the beauty of the Quantock hills and vales where they were roaming, the scenes amid which these great and happy days of youth and poetry and friendship were passed. It is the very poem in the margin of which, eight and thirty years afterwards, Coleridge on his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for Charles and Mary Lamb.

      THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON.

       Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

       This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

       Beauties and feelings such as would have been

       Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

       Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,

       Friends whom I never more may meet again

       On springy heath, along the hill-top edge

       Wander in gladness and wind down, perchance,

       To that still roaring dell of which I told;

       The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,

       And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

       Where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock

       Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,

       Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

       Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,

       Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends

       Behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds,

       That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)

       Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge

       Of the blue clay-stone.

       Now, my friends emerge

       Beneath the wide wide heaven—and view again

       The many-steepled tract magnificent

       Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,

       With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up

       The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles

       Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on

       In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,

       My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined

       And hungered after Nature, many a year,

       In the great City pent, winning thy way

       With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

       And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink

       Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!

       Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,

       Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn ye clouds!

       Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!

       And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my Friend,

       Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,

       Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round

       On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

       Less gross than bodily; and of such hues

       As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes

       Spirits perceive His presence. …

      *****

      On Lamb's return, he wrote in the same modest vein as before—

      "I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you or so subsided into my wonted uniformity of feeling as to sit calmly down to think of you and write. … Is the patriot [Thelwall] come? Are Wordsworth and his sister gone yet? I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater and had I met him I think it would have moved me almost to tears. You will oblige me, too, by sending me my great-coat which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at parting. Is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly behind! At present I have none; so send it me by a Stowey waggon if there be such a thing, directing it for C. L., No. 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, that inscription [of Wordsworth's]. It will recall to me the tones of all your voices, and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could not talk much while I was with you but my silence was not sullenness nor I hope from any bad motive; but in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole's and at Cruikshank's most like a sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did.

      "Are you and your dear Sara—to me also very dear because very kind—agreed yet about the management of little Hartley? And how go on the little rogue's teeth?"

      The mention of his address in the foregoing letter, shows that Lamb and his father had already quitted Little Queen Street. It is probable that they did so, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy; to escape, not only from the painful associations of the spot but also from the cruel curiosity which its terrible notoriety must have drawn upon them. The season was coming round which could not but renew his and Mary's grief and anguish in the recollection of that "day of horrors." "Friday next, Coleridge," he writes, "is the day (September 22nd) on which my mother died;" and in the letter is enclosed that beautiful and affecting poem beginning:—