SELBY
      He dismiss’d him straight,
      From dreams of grandeur and of Caliph’s love,
      To the bare cottage on the withering moor,
      Where friends, turn’d fiends, and hollow confidants,
      And widows, hide, who, in a husband’s ear,
      Pour baneful truths, but tell not all the truth;
      And told him not that Robert Halford died
      Some moons before his marriage-bells were rung. 
      Too near dishonour hast thou trod, dear wife,
      And on a dangerous cast our fates were set;
      But Heav’n, that will’d our wedlock to be blest,
      Hath interposed to save it gracious too. 
      Your penance is—­to dress your cheek in smiles,
      And to be once again my merry Kate.—­

      Sister, your hand. 
      Your wager won makes me a happy man,
      Though poorer, Heav’n knows, by a thousand pounds. 
      The sky clears up after a dubious day. 
      Widow, your hand.  I read a penitence
      In this dejected brow; and in this shame
      Your fault is buried.  You shall in with us,
      And, if it please you, taste our nuptial fare: 
      For, till this moment, I can joyful say,
      Was never truly Selby’s Wedding Day.

      FINIS.

NOTES

Page 1.  DEDICATION TO S.T.  COLERIDGE, ESQ.

In 1818, when Lamb wrote these words, he was forty-three and Coleridge forty-six.  The Works, in the first volume of which this dedication appeared, were divided into two volumes, the second, containing prose, being dedicated to Martin Burney, in the sonnet which I have placed on page 45.  The publishers of the Works were Charles and James Ollier, who, starting business about 1816, had already published for Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Shelley.

For the allusion to the threefold cord, in the second paragraph, see the note on page 313.

The ****** Inn was the Salutation and Cat, in Newgate Street, since rebuilt, where Coleridge used to stay on his London visits when he was at Cambridge, and where the landlord is said to have asked him to continue as a free guest—­if only he would talk and talk.  Writing to Coleridge in 1796 Lamb recalls “the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy;” and again, “I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation).”  Later he added to these concomitants of a Salutation evening, “Egg-hot, Welsh-rabbit, and metaphysics,” and gave as his highest idea of heaven, listening to Coleridge “repeating one of Bowles’s sweetest sonnets, in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fire side at the Salutation.”

The line—­

      Of summer days and of delightful years