I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is "thin sewn with profit or delight." Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceivd and expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him, but who could not persuade him to hate him again. His coyness to the other's passion (for hate demands a return as much as Love, and starves without it) is most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much.
For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in 'em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em—Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Sh——y.
I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that make such poor returns. But my head akes at the bare thought of letter writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering [? shrivelling] up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposit'n to write it is has stopt my Elias, but you will see a futile Effort in the next No., "wrung from me with slow pain."
The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything-to order me a new coat, for instance, tho' my old buttons are shelled like beans— is an effort.
My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old enditers of Folios must have had. What a mortify'd pulse. Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy— Wishing peace in thy new dwelling— C. LAMB.
[The Lambs gave up their "country lodgings" at Dalston on moving to
Colebrooke Row.
"The album." See next letter to Barton.
"The Prometheus Unbound." A bookseller, asked for Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's poem, had replied that Prometheus was not to be had "in sheets." Elfrida was a dramatic poem by William Mason, Gray's friend.
This is Shelley's poem (not a sonnet) which Lamb liked:—