My Beloved Friend,—Farewell! I shall never think of you but with tears of the tenderest affection. Our routes in life have been so opposite, that for a long time past there has not been that intercourse between us which our mutual affection would have otherwise occasioned. But at this serious moment, all your kindness and love for me press upon my memory with a weight of sensation I can scarcely endure.
········
You have heard of my destination, I suppose. I am going to Portugal to join the Second Royals, to which I have been appointed Deputy-Surgeon. What fate is in reserve for me I know not. I should be more indifferent to my future lot, if it were not for the hope of passing many pleasant hours, in times to come, in your society.
Adieu! my dearest fellow. My love to Mrs. C. Health and fraternity to young David.
Yours most affectionate,
R. Allen.
[167] A friend and fellow-collegian of Christopher Wordsworth at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a member of the “Literary Society” to which Coleridge, C. Wordsworth, Le Grice, and others belonged. He afterwards became a sergeant-at-law. He was an intimate friend of H. Crabb Robinson. See H. C. Robinson’s Diary, passim. See, too, Social Life at the English Universities, by Christopher Wordsworth, M. A., Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1874, Appendix.
[168] Not, as has been supposed, Charles and Mary Lamb, but Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Mary Lamb was not and could not have been at that time one of the party. The version sent to Southey differs both from that printed in the Annual Anthology of 1800, and from a copy in a contemporary letter sent to C. Lloyd. It is interesting to note that the words, “My sister, and my friends,” ll. 47 and 53, which gave place in the Anthology to the thrice-repeated, “My gentle-hearted Charles,” appear, in a copy sent to Lloyd, as “My Sara and my friend.” It was early days for him to address Dorothy Wordsworth as “My sister,” but in forming friendships Coleridge did not “keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded” from acquaintance to intimacy. Poetical Works, p. 92. For version of “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” sent to C. Lloyd, see Ibid., Editor’s Note, p. 591.
[169] “Elastic, I mean.”—S. T. C.
[170] “The ferns that grow in moist places grow five or six together, and form a complete ‘Prince of Wales’s Feathers,’—that is, plumy.”—S. T. C.
[171] “You remember I am a Berkleian.”—S. T. C.