"And now, my dear Barbara, farewell. I have not written such a long letter a long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write about. Wishing you may pass happily through the rest of your schooldays and every future day of your life,
"I remain,
"Your affectionate friend,
"M. Lamb.
"My brother sends his love to you. You say you are not so tall as Louisa—you must be; you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family" ["the measureless Bethams," Lamb called them]. "Now you have begun I shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from you again. I shall always receive a letter from you with very great delight."
The next is a joint letter to Wordsworth, in acknowledgment of an early copy of The Excursion, in which Charles holds the pen and is the chief spokesman; but Mary puts in a judicious touch of her own:—
"August 14th, 1814.
"I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world, too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but Mr. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it; but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read—a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren born out of due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I first saw you at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from the rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophet saw them in that sunset—the wheel, the potter's clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the four-fold visaged head, the throne and Him that sat thereon." [It was a mist glorified by sunshine, not a sunset, which the poet had described, as Lamb afterwards discovered.] "One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am feeling that which I cannot express. Reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument in Harrow Church. Do you know it? With its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.
"I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock-book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain-scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.
"C. Lamb and Sister."
Manning, who had latterly been "tarrying on the skirts of creation" in far Thibet and Tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last, in 1815, appeared once more on the horizon at the "half-way house" of Canton, to which place Lamb hazarded a letter,—a most incomparable "lying letter," and another to confess the cheat to St. Helena:—"Have you recovered the breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon…. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false Nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain."