As such a memory."
When Miss Wordsworth's reply to this consoling letter arrived, it devolved upon Charles to answer it for the sad reason stated. He writes (June 14, 1805):—"Your long, kind letter has not been thrown away, for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better; but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. She has been attacked with one of her severe illnesses and is at present from home. Last Monday week was the day she left me, and I hope I may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her indisposition…. I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. In the meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking of her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me, and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade…."
The death of Coleridge, in 1834, was a great bereavement to the Lambs. Charles seems to have lived under a constant sense of personal loss. In six months he followed his friend to the unseen world. The fond desire of the brother and sister that she should die first was thus unfulfilled; but she was becoming more and more cut off from the realities of life, and probably hardly ever realised the bitterness of the separation. Wordsworth wrote a poem to the memory of Lamb containing feeling allusions to Mary. In reference to it he said: "Were I to give way to my own feelings, I should dwell not only on her genius and intellectual powers, but upon the delicacy and refinement of manner which she maintained inviolable under most trying circumstances. She was loved and honoured by all her brother's friends; and others, some of them strange characters, whom his philanthropic peculiarities induced him to countenance."
Thou wert a scorner of the fields, my friend,
But more in show than truth; and from the fields,
And from the mountains, to thy rural grave
Transported, my soothed spirit hovers o'er
Its green, untrodden turf, and blowing flowers;
And taking up a voice shall speak (though still
Awed by the theme's peculiar sanctity