How tender-hearted they both are, and yet until now they had hardly realized that it was for Uncle John that they were wearing their fresh mourning. This was a new grief too sad to them, but it turned their gentle sympathies to their pretty dead mother, of whom they were always glad to hear. The father has scarcely begun to speak when he sees in Alice so much resemblance to his dead wife that he almost thinks it is the mother who stands beside him. So violent is his emotion that he gradually comes out of his reverie, and as he does so the children fade away and recede into the distance, saying, “We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.“
Is it not a wonderful thing that with so few words a writer can put his heart so much into yours that you believe almost as much as he does in the reality of the vision?
In the sketch of Lamb we said that his character was very strongly reflected in his writings, and this essay shows the fact wonderfully well. Imagine the man, lonely, heartbroken, weary from the awful task he had set himself, sitting in his bachelor armchair by the fire, dreaming his evening away. Who are the people that come to him in his dreams and what are the incidents? First his grandmother Field, with whom he had spent a great deal of his childhood; then his sweetheart Alice, now married to another, with children of her own; then his brother, by no means a pleasing character, but a lazy and selfish man who, however, in the rich, loving heart of his brother stands out as handsome, affectionate, noble and brave. How keenly he feels the bitter loss which comes to him with tenfold severity when he awakens, and which he makes the closing thought in the essay! Lastly, the faithful Mary, unchanged, appears at his side,—his waking companion, his greatest burden and his greatest joy.
Besides these evidences of his devoted and affectionate disposition, we find proof of his vivid imagination when as a child he gazes upon the old busts of the twelve Cæsars that had been emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them. In his busy-idle amusements at the great house he shows the innocence and simplicity of his pleasures, and in the delicate way in which he reproves Alice and John, his genial, sympathetic disposition as well as his abundant good humor. How much finer it was to say, “and such-like common baits of children“ than to have said, “John, put the grapes back on the plate.”
[335-1] Lamb’s grandmother, Mary Field, was for a long time housekeeper in one of the great English country houses, but not in the county alluded to in the text.
[335-2] This means that the incidents had but lately become familiar to the children. The story is the old one of the Babes in the Wood, as it is sometimes called.
[335-3] One of Lamb’s fancies; the chimney-carving in the real house represented stag and boar hunts.
[336-4] Westminster Abbey.
[336-5] An imaginary person with a cheap, showy drawing-room.
[336-7] The Book of Psalms, or such a portion of it as is used in the services of the English Church.