d tenderly led her away.

Returning in a few moments, the mother was dead.

Women often make a shrill outcry at sight of a mouse; men curse roundly
when large, buzzing, blue-bottle flies disturb their after-dinner nap; but
let occasion come and the stuff of which heroes are made is in us all. I
think well of my kind.

Charles Lamb made no outcry, he shed no tears, he spoke no word of
reproach. He met each detail of that terrible issue as coolly, calmly and
surely as if he had been making entries in his journal. No man ever loved
his mother more, but she was dead now--she was dead. He closed the staring
eyes, composed the stiffening limbs, kept curious sightseers at bay, and
all the time thought of what he could do to protect the living--she who
had wrought this ruin.

Charles was twenty-one--a boy in feeling and temperament, a frolicsome,
heedless boy. In an hour he had become a man.

It requires a subtler pen than mine to trace the psychology of this
tragedy; but let me say this much, it had its birth in love, in unrequited
love; and the outcome of it was an increase in love.

O God! how wonderful are Thy works! Thou makest the rotting log to nourish
banks of violets, and from the stagnant pool at Thy word springs forth the
lotus that covers all with fragrance and beauty!

* * * * *

Coleridge in his youth was brilliant--no one disputes that. He dazzled
Charles and Mary Lamb from the very first. Even when a Blue-Coat he could
turn a pretty quatrain, and when he went away to Cambridge and once in a
long while wrote a letter down to "My Own C.L.," it was a feast for the
sister, too. Mary was different from other girls: she didn't "have
company," she was too honest and serious and earnest for society--her
ideals too high. Coleridge--handsome, witty, philosophic Coleridge--was
her ideal. She loved him from afar.

How vain it is to ponder in our minds the what-might-have-been! Yet how
can we help wondering what would have been the result had Coleridge wedded
Mary Lamb! In many ways it seems it would have been an ideal mating, for
Mary Lamb's mental dowry made good Coleridge's every deficiency, and his
merits equalized all that she lacked. He was sprightly, headstrong,
erratic, emotional; she was equally keen-witted, but a conservative in her
cast of mind. That she was capable of a great and passionate love there is
no doubt, and he might have been. Mary Lamb would have been his anchor