"My Dear Emma and Edward Moxon,

"Accept my sincere congratulations and imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into good, set words. The dreary blank of unanswered questions which I ventured to ask in vain, was cleared up on the wedding-day by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance, begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon's health. It restored me from that moment, as if by an electric shock, to the entire possession of my senses. I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes and all care from my heart."

To which beautiful last words Charles adds:—

"Dears again—Your letter interrupted a seventeenth game at picquet which we were having after walking to Wright's and purchasing shoes. We pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon. Never was such a calm or such a recovery. 'Tis her own words undictated."

Not Tasso only was attacked, but even Dante. "You will be amused to hear," he tells Carey, "that my sister and I have, with the aid of Emma, scrambled through the Inferno by the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation. I think we scarce left anything un-made-out. But our partner has left us and we have not yet resumed. Mary's chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to you."

The year 1834, the last of Lamb's life, opened gloomily. Early in February was written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his utterances concerning Mary. With the exception of a brief, mournful allusion to her in his latest letter to Wordsworth these were his last written words about her, and they breathe the same tenderness and unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long struggle and endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. The letter is to Miss Fryer, an old school-fellow of Emma Isola:—"Your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover Street [the Moxons]. I see them pretty often. In one word, be less uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths of desolation as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me to be left to my sister. When she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone over it. I could be nowhere happier than under the same roof with her. Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may so call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of names and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally live again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain, with the vividness of real presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the Waldens, as a dream, sense and nonsense, truth and errors huddled together, a medley between inspiration and possession. What things we are! I know you will bear with me talking of things. It seems to ease me, for I have nobody to tell these things to now…."

A week later was written that last little letter to Wordsworth (the reader will recognize Louisa Martin—Monkey—so prettily described in Lamb's first letter to Hazlitt):—"I write from a house of mourning. The oldest and best friends I have left are in trouble. A branch of them (and they of the best stock of God's creatures, I believe) is establishing a school at Carlisle. Her name is Louisa Martin. For thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour I would stake my soul. Oh! if you could recommend her, how would I love you—if I could love you better! Pray, pray recommend her. She is as good a human creature—next to my sister, perhaps, the most exemplary female I ever knew. Moxon tells me you would like a letter from me; you shall have one. This I cannot mingle up with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from C. Lamb. Poor Mary is ill again, after a short, lucid interval of four or five months. In short, I may call her half dead to me. Good you are to me. Yours, with fervour of friendship, for ever."

The dearest friend of all, Coleridge, long in declining health—the "hooded eagle, flagging wearily," was lying this spring and summer in his last painful illness—heart disease chiefly, but complicated with other sources of suffering—borne with heroic patience. Thoughts of his youth came to him, he said, 'like breezes from the Spice islands;' and under the title of that poem written in the glorious Nether Stowey days when Charles was his guest,—This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,—he wrote a little while before he died:—

Charles and Mary Lamb,
Dear to my heart, yea, as it were my heart.
S. T. C. Æt. 63, 1834.
1797
1834
——
37 years!

He drew his last breath on the 25th of July. At first Lamb seemed wholly unable to grasp the fact that he was gone. "Coleridge is dead!" he murmured continually, as if to convince himself. He 'grieved that he could not grieve.' "But since," he wrote in that beautiful memorial of his friend—the last fragment shaped by his hand—"but since, I feel how great a part of me he was. His great and dear spirit haunts me…. He was my fifty-year old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see it again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gillman's more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel."