to go
again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard
much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet _us_, because we are _his_
friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my
ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the
dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable
second-rate figure.

Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way,
_through you_, to surfeit sick upon them.

Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to
Coleridge.

Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if
Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and
little David Hartley, your little reality.

Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written.

C. LAMB, _Umbra_.

[1] Miss Elizabeth Benger. See "Dictionary of Nationai Biography,"
iv. 221.

XXXIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

_January_, 1801.

Thanks for your letter and present. I had already borrowed your second
volume. [1] What pleases one most is "The Song of Lucy.". _Simon's sickly
Daughter_, in "The Sexton," made me _cry_. Next to these are the
description of these continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh,"
where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that
fine Shakspearian character of the "happy man" in the "Brothers,"--

"That creeps about the fields,
Following his fancies by the hour, to bring
Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles
Into his face, until the setting sun
Write Fool upon his forehead!"

I will mention one more,--the delicate and curious feeling in the wish
for the "Cumberland Beggar" that he may have about him the melody of
birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a
fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feeling for the
Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part
with the wish. The "Poet's Epitaph" is disfigured, to my taste, by the
common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse
epithet of "pin-point," in the sixth stanza. All the rest is eminently
good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the
"Beggar" that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like a
lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he is
imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult
in being told, "I wi