C. LAMB.
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[This is the first—and perhaps the finest—letter from Lamb to Wordsworth that has been preserved. Wordsworth, then living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, was nearly thirty-one years of age; Lamb was nearly twenty-six. The work criticised is the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second and sixth stanzas of the "Poet's Epitaph" ran thus:—
A Lawyer art thou?—draw not nigh;
Go, carry to some other place
The hardness of thy coward eye,
The falshood of thy sallow face.
* * * * *
Wrapp'd closely in thy sensual fleece
O turn aside, and take, I pray,
That he below may rest in peace,
Thy pin-point of a soul away!
St. Leon was by Godwin.
Of "The Ancient Mariner, a Poet's Reverie," Wordsworth had said in a note to the first volume of Lyrical Ballads:—
"The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the controul of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated."
"The Mad Mother." The poem beginning, "Her eyes are wild, her head is bare."