"'Saint Charles,' said Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one of Charles Lamb's letters to his forehead."[5]
[5] Edward FitzGerald's "Letters."
HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
The writings of Charles Lamb fall more or less naturally into four or five groups—with, of course, inevitable overlappings—and it is better to consider them thus, rather than in the strict order of their production.
POETRY
It was in poetry that he made his first essays, as we have seen, and this is not to be wondered at in one who had early read the old poetic treasures of our literature, and in the close companion of so deeply poetic a man as Coleridge. He was, indeed, himself essentially a poet, though his work in verse falls far below that which he achieved in prose. The perusal of a slim volume of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles was the small occasion from which sprang the great event of Lamb's and Coleridge's commencing to write poetry. To the sonnet form Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most felicitously, for two or three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which makes them remain in the mind. This one, with its familiar close, may stand as representative of the days when Bowles was still the god of his poetic idolatry:
The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,
And 'gins to sprinkle on the earth below
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,
I turn my back on thy detested walls,
Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind,
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;
Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.
I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,
That minded me of many a pleasure gone,
Of merrier days, of love and Islington;
Kindling afresh the flames of past desire.
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.