"GRETA HALL, Tuesday Night, December 2, 1800. "... Wordsworth has nearly finished the concluding poem. It is of a mild, unimposing character, but full of beauties to those short-necked men who have their hearts sufficiently near their heads-the relative distance of which (according to citizen Tourder, the French translator of Spallanzani) determines the sagacity or stupidity of all bipeds or quadrupeds.

"There is a deep blue cloud over the heavens; the lake, and the vales, and the mountains, are all in darkness; only the summits of all the mountains in long ridges, covered with snow, are bright to a dazzling excess. A glorious scene! ... God love you! S. T. COLERIDGE."†

On the 25th March 1801, Coleridge wrote thus to William Godwin :- ‡

"Have you seen the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads,' and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect, precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps instead of heart, I should have said taste, but when I think of The Brothers, of Ruth, and of Michael, I recur to the expression, and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for my life, be sure to say; Wordsworth descended on him like the гva σauró from heaven, by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet.'

* Fragmentary Remains of Sir Humphrey Davy, Bart. Edited by John Davy, M.D. Pp. 81-83.

† Ibid., p. 85.

William Godwin: his friends and contemporaries. By C. Kegan Paul. Vol. ii., p. 79.

The following is the fragment of a letter from Charles Lamb (part being lost),-on the reappearance of the Ballads, in two volumes. Lamb's inaccuracy, in quoting the poems by titles of his own, is characteristic.

"Thanks for your letter, and present. I had already borrowed your second volume. What most please me are, 'The Song of Lucy;' Simon's sickly daughter, in 'The Sexton,' made me cry. Next to these are the description of the continuous echoes, in the story of Joanna's Laugh,' where the mountains, and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that fine Skakespearian character of the 'happy man,' in the Brothers.' I will mention one more—the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the Cumberland Beggar,' that he may have about him the melody of birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own. feelings for the Beggar's; and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The Poet's Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of 'pinpoint,' in the sixth stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the Beggar,' that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like a lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject.' This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne, and very many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid; very different from 'Robinson Crusoe,' the Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Roderick Random,' and other beautiful bare narratives. There is

implied an unwritten compact between author and reader: 'I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it.' Modern novels, 'St Leon' and the like, are full of such flowers as these 'Let not my reader suppose,' 'Imagine, if you can, &c.' Modest! I will here have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you may not think I have passed over your book without observation. . . . I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his 'Ancient Mariner'' a Poet's Reverie.' It is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he only the scenical representation of a lion. is gained by his title but one subversive of all credit—which the tale should force upon us,-of its truth?

is not a lion, but What new idea

"For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feeling of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pipes's magic whistle. I totally

differ from the idea that the Mariner' should have had a character and profession. This is a beauty in Gulliver's Travels,' where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the Ancient Mariner' undergoes such trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality, or memory of what he was-like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is, I think as well, a little unfounded; the 'Mariner,' from being conversant in supernatural events, has acquired a super-nature and strange cast of phrase, eye, appearance, &c., which frighten the 'wedding-guest.' You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see.

"To sum up a general opinion of the second volume, I do

not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the 'Ancient Mariner,' the Mad Mother,' and the Lines at Tintern Abbey,' in the first."*

Wordsworth had written to Lamb in 1800, asking him to buy him some copies of the old English dramatists, and Lamb's very characteristic reply will be found among his letters, edited by Sergeant Talfourd (vol. i., pp. 170-173). A subsequent letter, in answer to Wordsworth's invitation to his friend to visit him in Cumberland, may be quoted, as it casts much light on the relationship and the differences between the two men.

nature.

"I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't now care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles;-life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print-shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her

*

Final Memorials of Charles Lamb. By Thomas Noon Talfourd. Vol. i., pp. 144-147.

crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved, -old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,-these are my mistresses-have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you did I not know that the mind will make friends of anything.. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind; and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.*

*

Alluding to the "Poem on the Naming of Places" called Joanna, and the effect of the echo of her laughter amongst the mountains.