as a delightful hint to the letter instructed. As it is, except a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it.

"C. LAMB."

"To MR WORDSWORTH.

"Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write in formâ. "DEAR WORDSWORTH,-The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgements for them in more than one short letter. The 'Night Piece,' to which you refer me, I meant fully to have noticed; but, the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down to scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me--I mean voluntary pen-work) I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say. So I had meant to have mentioned 'Yarrow Visited,' with that stanza, 'But thou, that didst appear so fair;' than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry;-yet the poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but one exquisite verse in it, the last but one or the two last-this has all fine, except, perhaps, that that of 'studious ease and generous cares' has a little tinge of the less romantic about it. "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale' is a charming counterpart to 'Poor Susan,' with the addition of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path, which is so fine in the Old Thief and the Boy by his side,' which always brings water into my eyes. Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition; 'Susan' stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe. There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten; 'bright volumes of vapour,' &c. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away; but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that ending to the Boy-builders is a mystery. I can't say positively now,-I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that 'Light-hearted boys, I will build up a giant with you.' It comes naturally, with a warm holiday, and the freshness of the blood. It is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a maying. (N.B.) I don't often go out a

maying;-Must is the tense with me now. Do you take the pun? Young Romilly is divine ;* the reasons of his mother's grief being remediless-I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves-Shakespeare had done something for the filial, in 'Cordelia,' and, by implication, for the fatherly too, in Lear's resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart. I get stupid, and flat, and flattering; what's the use of letting you know what good things you have written, or I hope I may add—that I know them to be good? Apropos-when I first opened upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, 'What is good for a bootless bene?' To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it), she answered, 'A shoeless pea.' It was the first she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well in your old preface, between the verses of Dr Johnson, of the Man in the Strand,' and that from 'The Babes in the Wood,' I was thinking whether taking your own glorious lines—

'And from the love which was in her soul

For her youthful Romilly ;'

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any, the best old ballads, and just altering it to

'And from the great respect she felt

For Sir Samuel Romilly,'

would not have explained the boundaries of prose expression, and poetic feeling, nearly as well.

"Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more

* The poem, entitled, "The Force of Prayer," developing the depths of a widowed mother's grief, whose only son has been drowned in attempting to leap over the precipice of the "Wharf" at Bolton Abbey. The first line, printed in old English characters, from some old English ballad,

"What is good for a bootless bene?"

suggests Miss Lamb's single pun. The following are the profoundest stanzas among those which excite her brother's most just admiration:—

"If for a lover the lady wept,

A solace she might borrow

From death, and from the passion of death;

Old Wharf might heal her sorrow.

She weeps not for the wedding-day
Which was to be to-morrow:
Her hope was a further-looking hope,
And hers is a mother's sorrow."

-(T. N. T.)

than I for a spiritual taste of that ' White Doe' you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when drest, i.e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which, I think, would not very much win upon me in print is Peter Bell. But I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it was in knowing what good verse was. Who looked over your proof-sheets and left ordebo in that line of Virgil ?—

Yours dear W., and all yours,

C. LAMB."

The following letter is in acknowledgment of an early copy of "The Excursion":

TO MR WORDSWORTH.

DEAR WORDSWORTH,-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 M. B. came in (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 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 saw you first 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 P- from the card-table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled setting; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified,

The passage to which the allusion applies does not picture a sunset, but the effect of sunlight on a receding mist among the mountains, in the second book of "The Excursion."—(T. N. T.)

such as the prophets saw them in that sunset-the wheel, the potter's clay, the washpot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the baskets of figs, the fourfold visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon.*

"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. The 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.

me.

"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 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 town had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.

...

[Lamb was delighted with the proposition, made through Southey, that he should review "The Excursion" in the "Quarterly," though he had never before attempted contemporaneous criticism, and cherished a dislike to it, which the event did not diminish. The ensuring letter was addressed while meditating on his office, and uneasy lest he should lose it for want of leisure. (T. N. Talfourd.)]

"MY DEAR W. I reclaimed your book, which Hazlitt has mercilessly kept, only two days ago, and have made shift to read it again with shattered brain. It does not lose-rather some parts have come out with a prominence I did not perceive before—but such was my aching head yesterday (Sunday) that the book was like a mountain landscape to one that should walk on the edge of a precipice; I perceived beauty dizzily. . . . Mary thanks you, and feels highly grateful for your Patent of Nobility,' and acknowledges the author of 'The Excursion' as the legitimate fountain of honour. We both agree

Fix'd resemblances were seen

To implements of ordinary use,
But vast in size, in substance glorified;
Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld
In vision-forms uncouth of mightiest powers,

For admiration and mysterious awe.

(See p. 103)-ED.

that, to our feeling, Ellen is best as she is. To us there would have been something repugnant in her challenging her Penance as a dowry; the fact is explicable, but how few are those to whom it would have been rendered explicit. The unlucky reason of the detention of 'The Excursion' was Hazlitt, for whom M. Burney borrowed it on Friday. His remarks had some vigour in them,* particularly something about an old ruin being too modern for your Primeval Nature, and about a lichen; I forget the passage, but the whole wore an air of despatch. That objection which M. Burney had imbibed from him about Voltaire, I explained to M. B. (or tried) exactly on your principle of its being a characteristic speech. That it was no settled comparative estimate of Voltaire with any of his own tribe of buffoons-no injustice, even if you spoke it, for I dared say you never could relish "Candide." I know I tried to get through it about a twelvemonth since, and couldn't for the dulness. Now I think I have a wider range in buffoonery than you. Too much toleration perhaps. . . ."

"DEAR W. . . . The "scapes of the great god Pan, who appeared among your mountains some dozen years since, and his narrow chance of being submerged by the swains, afforded me much pleasure. I can conceive the water-nymphs pulling for him. . . . By this way, I deprived myself of "Sir Alfred Irthing," and the reflexions that conclude his story, which are the flower of the poem. Hazlitt had given the reflections before me. C. LAMB."

...

ΝΟΤΕ Ι.

(See p. 6.)

The Yew-tree, which was the pride of Lorton Vale," is now a ruin, and has lost all its ancient majesty: but, until the close of 1883, the "fraternal four" of Borrowdale were still to be seen "in grand assemblage." Every one who has ever felt the power of Wordsworth's poetry, and especially every one who has visited the Seathwaite valley, and read the poem Yew-Trees, under the shade of that once 66 solemn and capacious grove,”—must feel as if they had lost a personal friend, when they hear that the Grove is gone. The great gale of December 11, 1883, smote it fiercely, uprooting one of the trees, and blowing the others to ribbands. The following is Mr Rawnsley's account of the disaster, and the sonnets which follow it are also his.

"Last week the gale that ravaged England did the Lake country much harm. We could spare many of the larch plantations, and could

This refers to an article of Hazlitt on The Excursion in "The Examiner."-(T. N. T.)

+ The passage in which the copy of "Candide," found in the apartment of the Recluse, is described as the "dull production of a scoffer's brain," which had excited Hazlitt to energetic vindication of Voltaire from the charge of dulness.-(T. N. T.)