y were very fondly attached to each other, and
the only pleasure they had in their cheerless youth was their
intercourse. They were both gifted, and of gentle and kind disposition,
and their affection for each other was more sympathetic and filled with
a deeper insight into each other's characters and feelings than is
common between brothers and sisters. In little intervals between their
varied labors they wrote and read to each other many things which would
have a rare value in these days had they been preserved; and this, with
wandering together through the streets in the evenings and looking at
the outside of the theatres, seems to have constituted their only
youthful pleasure. At the age of twenty-one Charles showed symptoms of
the family curse, and his sister herself almost lost her reason in
unavailing sorrow over his condition. So young, so gifted, and
threatened with such dread disaster,--his loving Mary could not have it
so. She even rebelled against Heaven in the extreme of her agony, and
called upon God to relieve them both from such ill-fated life. But all
her prayers and tears and rebellious risings up against destiny did not
avail, and Charles was placed in a mad-house, where he passed a portion
of the year 1796. In one of his lucid intervals he wrote a sonnet,
"Mary, to thee, my sister, and my friend," which is a touching and
tender tribute to her love. Long afterward he was able to write of the
experience quite cheerfully:--

"I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while
it lasted I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy
till you have gone mad!"

But there is a painful commentary upon the bitterness of after-life to
him in the thought that he could look back upon this dreadful season as
a period when he had some happiness. The attack in his case was of brief
duration, and it never recurred, which, considering all the sorrows and
all the irregularities of his life, seems remarkable. He had not been
long in a condition to be responsible when the tragedy took place which
cast its blight upon his life. In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb,
"worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to
needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into
uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table spread for
dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. T