TO WORDSWORTH.
Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write in formâ.
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 and 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, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated (by the way, I mast 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:" [1] 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 last two: this is 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 vapor," etc. 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 [2] 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,—Shakspeare 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 telling you what good things you have written, or—I hope I may add—that I know them to be good? A propos, 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?" [3] To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it) she answered, "A shoeless pea." It was the first joke 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 of the best old ballads, and just altering it to,—
"And from the great respect she felt
For Sir Samuel Romilly,"
would not nave 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 than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, 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?
My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted,—that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not,—it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first, I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had it rectified, It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading "No thoroughfare." Robinson's is entire; I wish you would write more criticism about Spencer, etc. I think I could say something about him myself; but, Lord bless me! these "merchants and their spicy drugs," which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper, I engross when I should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe; and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks: Vale.
Yours, dear W., and all yours,
C. LAMB.
[1] "But thou, that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her dilicate Creation"
[2] Better known as "Rural Architecture."
[3] The first line of the poem on Bolton Abbey:—
"'What is good for a bootless bene?'
With these dark words begins my fate;
And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring
When Prayer is of no avail?"