Sir, If you can spare a moment, I should be happy to hear from you—that rogue Robinson detained your verses, till I call'd for them. Don't entrust a bit of prose to the rogue, but believe me
Your obliged C.L.
My Sister sends her kind regards.
[Crabb Robinson took Landor to see Lamb on September 28, 1832. The following passage in Forster's Life of Landor describes the visit and explains this letter:—
The hour he passed with Lamb was one of unalloyed enjoyment. A letter from Crabb Robinson before he came over had filled him with affection for that most lovable of men, who had not an infirmity to which his sweetness of nature did not give something of kinship to a virtue. "I have just seen Charles and Mary Lamb," Crabb Robinson had written (20th October, 1831), "living in absolute solitude at Enfield. I find your poems lying open before Lamb. Both tipsy and sober he is ever muttering Rose Aylmer. But it is not those lines only that have a curious fascination for him. He is always turning to Gebir for things that haunt him in the same way." Their first and last hour was now passed together, and before they parted they were old friends. I visited Lamb myself (with Barry Cornwall) the following month, and remember the boyish delight with which he read to us the verses which Landor has written in the album of Emma Isola. He had just received them through Robinson, and had lost little time in making rich return by sending Landor his Last Essays of Elia.
These were Landor's verses:—
TO EMMA ISOLA
Etrurian domes, Pelasgian walls,
Live fountains, with their nymphs around
Terraced and citron-scented halls,
Skies smiling upon sacred ground—
The giant Alps, averse to France,
Point with impatient pride to those,
Calling the Briton to advance,
Amid eternal rocks and snows—
I dare not bid him stay behind,
I dare not tell him where to see
The fairest form, the purest mind,
Ausonia! that e'er sprang from thee,