Mary Lamb. Gilchrist Anne Burrows

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СКАЧАТЬ 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: —

      Alas! how am I changed? Where be the tears,

      The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath,

      And all the dull desertions of the heart,

      With which I hung o'er my dead mother's corse?

      Where be the blest subsidings of the storm

      Within? The sweet resignedness of hope

      Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love

      In which I bowed me to my Father's will?

*****

      Mary's was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow, – "my dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." She continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year.

      On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits, – "My teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for sympathy… My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you. Continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is not 'all barrenness.'"

      But by Christmas Day she was once more in the asylum. In sad solitude he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love: —

      I am a widow'd thing now thou art gone!

      Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend,

      Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor!

      Alas! that honour'd mind whose sweet reproof

      And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth'd

      The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech,

      And made me loving to my parents old

      (Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?)

      That honour'd mind become a fearful blank,

      Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept out

      From human sight or converse, while so many

      Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large,

      Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame?

      Thy paths are mystery!

      Yet I will not think

      Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live

      In quietness and die so, fearing God.

      Or if not, and these false suggestions be

      A fit of the weak nature, loth to part

      With what it loved so long and held so dear;

      If thou art to be taken and I left

      (More sinning, yet unpunish'd save in thee,)

      It is the will of God, and we are clay

      In the potter's hand; and at the worst are made

      From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace,

      Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us,

      Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.

      To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written, after affectionate enquiries for Hartley "the minute philosopher" and Hartley's mother, – "Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds."

      And again, three months after his return from Stowey, he wrote sorrowfully almost plaintively, remonstrating for Lloyd's sake and his own: —

      "You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings:

      I am prouder

      That I was once your friend, tho' now forgot,

      Than СКАЧАТЬ