by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense.  When I was young, I used to chant with ecstasy “MILD ARCADIANS EVER BLOOMING,” till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense.  Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and I think it better than “Windsor Forest,” “Dying Christian’s Address,” etc.  Coleridge has sent his tragedy to D.L.T.; it cannot be acted this season, and by their manner of receiving I hope he will be able to alter it to make them accept it for next.  He is at present under the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman?) at Highgate, where he plays at leaving off laud—–­m.  I think his essentials not touched; he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory,—­an archangel a little damaged.  Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind letter?  We are not quiet enough; Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the Temple.  Coleridge is absent but four miles; and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons.  ’Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet.  If I lived with him or the Author of the “Excursion," I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a net.  How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I may term material! There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke’s “Treatise on the Human Understanding,” or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the “Pleasures of Hope,” or more natural “Beggar’s Petition.”  I never entangle myself in any of their speculations.  Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have dreadful.  Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors.  I hold you a guinea you don’t find the chasm where I left off, so excellently the wounded sense closed again and was healed.

N.B.—­Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any:  but I pay dearer:  what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence.  As to your question about work, it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances; it takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; but it does not kill my peace, as before.  Some day or other I shall be in a taking again.  My head aches, and you have had enough, God bless you!

C. LAMB.

[1] Wordsworth’s “Letter to a Friend of Burns” (London, 1816).

“Wordsworth had been consulted by a friend of Burns as to the best mode of vindicating the reputation of the poet, which, it was alleged, had been much injured by the publication of Dr. Carrie’s ’Life and Correspondence of Burns.’”—­AINGER.