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uthings of Lord Byron become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic silence of Charles Lamb." "What sad, large pieces it cuts out of life," Lamb writes in 1809,--"out of _her_ life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live together." Once again when she was in confinement he writes:-- "It cuts out great slices of the time--the little time--we shall have to live together. But I won't talk of death; I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,--the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs." Then away on in 1833 he writes to Wordsworth:-- "Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. . . . I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing,--nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration,--shocking as they were to me then." This sister was a woman quite worthy of his devotion. Possessed of genius somewhat akin to that of her brother, she also handled a delicate pen, and but for her misfortune would have been well known in the world of books. She was in complete sympathy with her brother, in heart as well as in mind. And the record of their lives is one of the most beautiful pictures of brotherly and sisterly affection in all literature. Let us turn from the dark picture, and see some of the brighter sides of this life, sketched so far in Rembrandt-like color. Throughout all this darkness and dread, he had joked and jested his way on, amusing his friends in private, and entertaining the world of letters by his genial humor. It welled up as from a hidden fountain, and that fountain never failed but with life. So easily and spontaneously did it flow, that if he wanted an order to see the play, for some friends, he would scribble something like this to Ayrton:-- "I would go to the play In a very economical sort of a way, Rather to see Than be seen; Though I'm no ill sight Neither-- By candle-light, And in some kinds of weather, You might pit
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