Mary Lamb. Gilchrist Anne Burrows

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СКАЧАТЬ in January 1797 Lamb wrote to Coleridge: – "You and Sara are very good to think so kindly and so favourably of poor Mary. I would to God all did so too. But I very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father's lifetime. It is very hard upon her, but our circumstances are peculiar and we must submit to them. God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest goodest creature to me when I was at school, who used to toddle there to bring me good things when I, school-boy like, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old Grammar School and open her apron and bring out her basin with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me, – the good old creature is now lying on her death-bed. I cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. To the shock she received on that our evil day from which she never completely recovered, I impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me, I was always her favourite."

      She lingered a month, and then went to occupy

      "… the same grave bed

      Where the dead mother lies.

      Oh, my dear mother! oh, thou dear dead saint!

      Where's now that placid face, where oft hath sat

      A mother's smile to think her son should thrive

      In this bad world when she was dead and gone;

      And where a tear hath sat (take shame, O son!)

      When that same child has proved himself unkind.

      One parent yet is left – a wretched thing,

      A sad survivor of his buried wife,

      A palsy-smitten childish old, old man,

      A semblance most forlorn of what he was."

      "I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended her days of suffering and infirmity," says Lamb to Coleridge. "Good God! who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years; she was a very hearty old woman… But she was a mere skeleton before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave than one fresh dead."

      "I thank you; from my heart, I thank you," Charles again wrote to Coleridge, "for your solicitude about my sister. She is quite well, but must not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good while. In the first place, because it would hurt her and hurt my father for them to be together; secondly, from a regard to the world's good report; for I fear tongues will be busy whenever that event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she should be in perpetual confinement. What she hath done to deserve, or the necessity of such an hardship I see not; do you?"

      At length Lamb determined to grapple, on Mary's behalf, with the difficulties and embarrassments of the situation. "Painful doubts were suggested," says Talfourd, "by the authorities of the parish where the terrible occurrence happened, whether they were not bound to institute proceedings which must have placed her for life at the disposition of the Crown, especially as no medical assurance could be given against the probable recurrence of dangerous frenzy. But Charles came to her deliverance; he satisfied all the parties who had power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life; and he kept his word. Whether any communication with the Home Secretary occurred before her release I have been unable to ascertain. It was the impression of Mr. Lloyd, from whom my own knowledge of the circumstances, which the letters do not contain was derived, that a communication took place, on which a similar pledge was given. At all events the result was that she left the asylum and took up her abode," not with her brother yet, but in lodgings near him and her father.

      He writes to Coleridge, April 7th, 1797: "Lloyd may have told you about my sister… If not, I have taken her out of her confinement, and taken a room for her at Hackney, and spend my Sundays, holidays, &c., with her. She boards herself. In a little half year's illness and in such an illness, of such a nature and of such consequences, to get her out into the world again, with a prospect of her never being so ill again, this is to be ranked not among the common blessings of Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart and make me as thankful as, in my distress, I was earnest in my prayers. Congratulate me on an ever-present and never alienable friend like her, and do, do insert, if you have not lost, my dedication [to Mary]. It will have lost half its value by coming so late." And of another sonnet to her, which he desires to have inserted, he says: "I wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary."

      Two events which brightened this sad year must not be passed over though Mary, the sharer of all her brother's joys and sorrows, had but an indirect participation in them. Just when he was most lonely and desolate at the close of the fatal year he had written to Coleridge: "I can only converse with you by letter, and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge from the self-same sources, our communication with the scenes of the world alike narrow. Never having kept separate company or any 'company' together– never having read separate books and few books together, what knowledge have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and connections how few sentiments can take place without friends, with few books, with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit! We need some support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely and be not sparing of your advice; continue to remember us and to show us you do remember; we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and yours. All I can add to your happiness will be sympathy; you can add to mine more, you can teach me wisdom."

      Quite suddenly, at the beginning of the new year, there came to break this solitude Charles Lloyd, whose poems were to company Lamb's own and Coleridge's in the forthcoming volume: a young man of quaker family who was living in close fellowship with that group of poets down in Somersetshire towards whom Lamb's eyes and heart were wistfully turned as afterwards were to be those of all lovers of literature. How deeply he was moved by this spontaneous seeking for his friendship on Lloyd's part, let a few lines from one of those early poems which, in their earnest simplicity and sincerity, are precious autobiographic fragments tell: —

      Alone, obscure, without a friend,

      A cheerless, solitary thing,

      Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?

      What offering can the stranger bring

      Of social scenes, home-bred delights,

      That him in aught compensate may

      For Stowey's pleasant winter nights,

      For loves and friendships far away?

*****

      For this a gleam of random joy,

      Hath flush'd my unaccustom'd cheek,

      And with an o'ercharged bursting heart

      I feel the thanks I cannot speak.

      O sweet are all the Muses' lays,

      And sweet the charm of matin bird —

      'Twas long since these estranged ears

      The sweeter voice of friend had heard.

      The next was a yet brighter gleam – a fortnight with Coleridge at Nether Stowey and an introduction to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, forerunner of a life-long friendship in which Mary was soon to share. The visit took place in the July of this same year 1797. The prospect of it had dangled tantalizingly before Charles' eyes for a year or more; and now at last his chiefs at the India House were propitious and he wrote: "May I, can I, shall I come so soon?.. I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do I desire to see you, to come among you, to see the young philosopher [Hartley, the poet's first child] to thank Sara for her last year's invitation in person, to read your tragedy, to read over together our little book, to breathe fresh air, to revive in me vivid images of 'Salutation scenery.' There is a sort of sacrilege in my letting СКАЧАТЬ