[In] "the next poem to your friend," … [Lamb is] speaking of
Coleridge's lines "To Charles Lloyd"—those beginning
"A mount, not wearisome and bare and steep."
In the "forthcoming edition" the poet improved a little the barely tolerated line, making it read,—
"As neighb'ring fountains image, each the whole,"
but did not take Lamb's hint to omit the five which closed the poem. Lamb, however, got his way—perhaps took it—when the verses were reprinted in 1803, in the volume he saw through the press for Coleridge.
"Neither shall you omit the 2 following poems. 'The hour when we shall meet again' is [only?] a fine fancy, 'tis true, but fancy catering in the service of the feeling—fetching from her stores most splendid banquets to satisfy her. Do not, do not, omit it."
So wrote Lamb of these somewhat slender verses, but his friend had composed them "during illness and in absence," and Lamb in his own heart-sickness and loneliness detected the reality which underlay the conventionality of expression. The critic slept, and even when he was awake again in 1803 was fain to let the lines be reprinted with only the concession of their worst couplet:—
"While finely-flushing float her kisses meek,
Like melted rubies, o'er my pallid cheek."
The second of the "2 following poems" was Coleridge's "Sonnet to the River Otter." The version then before him "excludes," complains Lamb, "those equally beautiful lines which deserve not to be lost, 'as the tir'd savage,' &c., and I prefer the copy in your Watchman. I plead for its preference." This pleading … was not responded to in the way Lamb wanted, but in the appendix to the 1797 volume Coleridge printed the whole of the poem on an "Autumnal Evening," to which the "tir'd savage" properly belonged….
"Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets." Lamb here refers to the third portion of the poetical present—the twenty-eight sonnets to be bound up with those of Bowles. Thomas Dermody (1775-1802) was an Irish poet of squalidly dissolute life. A collection of his verses appeared in 1792.]