Oh memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife,
And give those scenes thine everlasting life.
I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his arm, and the first with a bon-mot in his mouth. It was at Godwin’s that I met him with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing fiercely which was the best—Man as he was, or man as he is to be. ‘Give me’, says Lamb, ‘man as he is not to be.’ This saying was the beginning of a friendship between us, which I believe still continues.—Enough of this for the present.
But there is matter for another rhyme,
And I to this may add a second tale.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen them equalled.
[15] He complained in particular of the presumption of his attempting to establish the future immortality of man, ‘without’ (as he said) ‘knowing what Death was or what Life was’—and the tone in which he pronounced these two words seemed to convey a complete image of both.
[16] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.