TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"1814.

"Dear W.-Your experience about tailors seems to be in point blank opposition to Burton, as much as the author of 'The Excursion' does, toto cælo, differ in his notion of a country life, from the picture which W. H. has exhibited of the same. But, with a little explanation, you and B. may be reconciled. It is evident that he confined his observations to the genuine native London Tailor. What freaks tailor-nature may take in the country is not for him to give account of. And certainly some of the freaks recorded do give an idea of the persons in question being beside themselves, rather than in harmony with the common, moderate, selfenjoyment of the rest of mankind. A flyingtailor, I venture to say, is no more in rerum naturâ than a flying-horse or a Gryphon. His wheeling his airy-flight from the precipice you mention, had a parallel in the melancholy Jew who toppled from the monument. Were his limbs ever found? Then, the man who cures diseases by words, is evidently an inspired tailor. Burton never affirmed that the art of sewing disqualified the practiser of it from being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. He never enters into such subjects. 'Tis the common, uninspired tailor which he speaks of. Again, the person who makes his smiles to be heard, is evidently a man under possession; a demoniac tailor. A greater hell than his own must have a hand in this. I am not certain that the cause which you advocate has much reason for triumph. You seem to me to substitute light-headedness for light-heartedness by a trick, or not to know the difference. I confess, a grinning tailor would shock me. Enough of tailors!

"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 waternymphs pulling for him. He would have been another Hylas-W. Hylas. In a mad letter which Capel Lofft wrote to M. M.* Phillips (now Sir Richard) I remember his noticing a metaphysical article of Pan,

Monthly Magazine.

The

"That Review you speak of, I am only sorry it did not appear last month. circumstances of haste and peculiar bad spirits under which it was written, would have excused its slightness and inadequacy, the full load of which I shall suffer from its lying by so long, as it will seem to have done, from its postponement. I write with great difficulty, and can scarce command my own resolution to sit at writing an hour together. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin. I hope you will see goodwill in the thing. I had a difficulty to perform not to make it all panegyric; I have attempted to personate a mere stranger to you; perhaps with too much strangeness. But you must bear that in mind when you read it, and not think that I am, in mind, distant from you or your poem, but that both are close to me, among the nearest of persons and things. I do but act the stranger in the Review. Then, I was puzzled about extracts and determined upon not giving one that had been in the 'Examiner;' for extracts repeated give an idea that there is a meagre allowance of good things. By this way, I deprived myself of Sir Alfred Irthing,' and the reflections that conclude his story, which are the flower of the poem. Hazlitt had given the reflections before me. Then it is the first review I ever did, and I did not know how long I might make it. But it must speak for itself, if Gifford and his crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect. Farewell. Love to all. Mary keeps very bad. C. LAMB."

The apprehension expressed at the close of the last letter was dismally verified. The following contains Lamb's first burst of an

Afterwards the distinguished and unfortunate editor of the London Magazine.

"1814.

"Dear Wordsworth, I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what you will see in the 'Quarterly' is a spurious one, which Mr. Baviad Gifford has palmed upon it for mine. I never felt more vexed in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it, out of spite at me, because he once suffered me to be called a lunatic in his Review.* The language he has altered throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it was, in point of composition, the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ; and so my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm, if it had any, is all gone more than a third of the substance is cut away, and that not all from one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is changed for a nasty cold

one.

"I have not the cursed alteration by me; I shall never look at it again; but for a specimen, I remember I had said the poet of 'The Excursion' walks through common forests as through some Dodona or enchanted wood, and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one in Tasso, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him far higher love-lays.' It is now (besides half-adozen alterations in the same half-dozen lines) but in language more intelligent reveals to him ;'-that is one I remember.

"But that would have been little, putting his shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) instead of mine, which has been tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can comprehend; for I reckon myself a dab at prose;-verse I leave to my betters: God help them, if they are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter! I have read 'It won't do.'t

In alluding to Lamb's note on the great scene of "The Broken Heart," where Calantha dances on, after hearing at every pause of some terrible calamity, a writer in the "Quarterly" had affected to excuse the writer as a "maniac;" a suggestion which circumstances rendered most cruel.

But worse than altering words; he has kept a few members only of the part I had done best, which was to explain all I could of your 'Scheme of Harmonies,' as I had ventured to call it, between the external universe and what within us answers to it. To do this I had accumulated a good many short passages, rising in length to the end, weaving in the extracts as if they came in as a part of the text naturally, not obtruding them as specimens. Of this part a little is left, but so as, without conjuration, no man could tell what I was driving at. A proof of it you may see (though not judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words. I had spoken something about 'natural methodism;' and after follows, and therefore the tale of Margaret should have been postponed' (I forget my words, or his words); now the reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what goes before, as they are from the 104th Psalm. The passage whence I deduced it, has vanished, but clapping a colon before a therefore is always reason enough for Mr. Baviad Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I assure you my complaints are founded. I know how sore a word altered makes one; but, indeed, of this review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did not keep a copy. I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its imperfection or inadequateness in size and method I knew; but for the writingpart of it I was fully satisfied; I hoped it would make more than atonement. Ten or twelve distinct passages come to my mind, which are gone, and what is left is, of course, the worse for their having been there; the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left.

"I read it at Arch's shop with my face burning with vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a review written against myself, making false quotations from me. But I am ashamed to say so much about a short piece. How are you served! and the labours of years turned into contempt by scoundrels!

"But I could not but protest against your

R

The following letter to Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, who resided with the poet at Rydal, relates to matters of yet nearer interest.

TO MISS HUTCHINSON.

66 Thursday, 19th Oct., 1815. "Dear Miss H.,-I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely, and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favourable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness, but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. I don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had had no partial separations. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at Drury lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks;-'the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.' Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla ! I feel I hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me, and involve me in a

The following three letters best speak for themselves :

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"The conclusion of this epistle getting gloomy, I have chosen this part to desire our kindest loves to Mrs. Wordsworth and to Dorothea. Will none of you ever be in London again?

"1815.

"Dear Wordsworth,-You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. I have been carefully through the two volumes, to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a character in antithetic manner, which I do not know why you left out, the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it, in my mind, less complete,-and one admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the glancing sand-piper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand. I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the alteration for the 'friendly reader,' but the 'malicious' will take it to himself. If you give 'em an inch, &c. The Preface is noble, and such as you should write. I wish I could set my name to it, Imprimatur,—but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you. I had rather be a door-keeper in your margin, than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in the volumes, which are new to me, are so much in the

old tone, that I hardly received them as novelties. Of those, of which I had no previous knowledge, the 'Four Yew Trees,'* and the mysterious company which you have assembled there, most struck me-Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow.' It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for years for. 'Laodamia' is a very original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.

"Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture-collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. He gave a few shillings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady had had it for a great many years. Its age is ascertainable from the state of the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the heads in the Tonson editions, with which we are all so well familiar. Since I saw you I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day, the Latin Poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extravaganzas. Why I mention him is, that your 'Power of Music' reminded me of his poem of 'The Ballad-singer in the Seven Dials.' Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A B C, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's 'Principia?' I was lately fatiguing myself with going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow; excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales; but what an aching vacuum of matter! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to

The poem on the four great yew trees of Borrowdale, which the poet has, by the most potent magic of the imagination, converted into a temple for the ghastly forms of Death and Time "to meet at noon-tide,❞—a passage surely not surpassed in any English poetry written since the days of Milton.

+ The following little passage about Vincent Bourne has been previously printed.

Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, prettymannered, matter-ful creature sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why wasn't he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?

"I am almost sorry that you printed extracts from those first poems,* or that you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do altogether. Besides, they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind as referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece, they might have been written in the same week; these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been reading. We were glad to see the poems 'by a female friend.' The one on the wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapt a D. at the corner, and let it have past as a printer's mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better instructed. As it is, expect a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it. I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be. On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner except) to eleven at night; last night till nine. My business and office business in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days, and some five days besides, which I used to dub Nature's holidays. I have had my day. I had formerly little to do. So of the little that is left of life, I may reckon two-thirds as dead, for time that a man may call his own is his life; and hard work and thinking about it taint even the leisure hours,-stain Sunday with work-day contemplations. This is Sunday: and the head-ache I have is part

The "Evening Walk," and "Descriptive Sketches among the Alps"-Wordsworth's earliest poems-now happily restored in their entirety to their proper places in the poet's collected works.

By Miss Dorothea Wordsworth.

late hours at work the two preceding nights, and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwards. But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort.

To them each evening had its glittering star,

And every sabbath-day its golden sun '—

to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time! O that from that superfluity of holiday-leisure my youth wasted, Age might but take some hours youth wanted not.' N.B.—I have left off spirituous liquors for four or more months, with a moral certainty of its lasting.* Farewell, dear Wordsworth! "O happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure! from some returned English I hear, that not such a thing as a countinghouse is to be seen in her streets,-scarce a desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and its 'gripple merchants,' as Drayton hath it-born to be the curse of this brave isle!' I invoke this, not on account of any parsimonious habits the mercantile interest may have, but, to confess truth, because I am not fit for an office.

"Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodise, a stomach to digest, and all out of tune. Better harmonies await you! C. LAMB."

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

voluntary pen-work) I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne, or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated, (by the way, I must look out V. B. for you). 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

6

"1815.

"Dear Wordsworth,-The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgments 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

Alas! for moral certainty in this moral but mortal world! Lamb's resolution to leave off spirituous liquors was a brave one; but he strengthened and rewarded it by such copious libations of porter, that his sister, for whose sake mainly he attempted the sacrifice, entreated him to "live like himself," and in a few weeks after this assurance he obeyed her.

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

"But thou, that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation."