Lamb naturally protested when the result came under his eyes.  “I love my own feelings:  they are dear to memory,” he says in a letter in 1796, “though they now and then wake a sigh or a tear.  ’Thinking on divers things foredone,’ I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs.”  Later, when Coleridge’s second edition was in preparation, Lamb wrote again (January 10, 1797):  “I need not repeat my wishes to have my little sonnets printed verbatim my last way.  In particular, I fear lest you should prefer printing my first sonnet [this one] as you have done more than once, ‘Did the wand of Merlin wave?’ It looks so like Mr.  Merlin, the ingenious successor of the immortal Merlin, now living in good health and spirits, and flourishing in magical reputation in Oxford Street.”  The phrase “more than once” in the foregoing passage needs explanation.  It refers to the little pamphlet of sonnets, entitled Sonnets from Various Authors, which Coleridge issued privately in 1796, and of which only one copy is now known to exist—­that preserved in the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington.  The little pamphlet contains twenty-eight sonnets in all, of which three are by Bowles, four by Southey, four by Charles Lloyd, four by Coleridge, four by Lamb, and others by various writers:  all of which were chosen for their suitability to be bound up with the sonnets of Bowles.  Lamb’s sonnets were:  “We were two pretty babes” (see page 9), “Was it some sweet device” (printed with Coleridge’s alterations), “When last I roved” (see page 8), and “O!  I could laugh” (see page 5).

The present sonnet belongs to the series of four love sonnets which is completed by the one that follows, “Methinks, how dainty sweet it were,” and those on page 8 beginning, “When last I roved” and “A timid grace.”  Anna is believed to have been Ann Simmons, who lived at Blenheims, a group of cottages near Blakesware, the house where Mrs. Field, Lamb’s grandmother, was housekeeper.  Mrs. Field died in 1792, after which time Lamb’s long visits to that part of the country probably ceased.  He was then seventeen.  Nothing is known of Lamb’s attachment beyond these sonnets, the fact that when he lost his reason for a short time in 1795-1796 he attributed the cause to some person unmentioned who is conjectured to have been Anna, and the occasional references in the Ella essays to “Alice W——­” and to his old passion for her (see “Dream Children” in particular, in Vol.  II).  The death of Mrs. Lamb in September, 1796, and the duty of caring for and nursing his sister Mary, which then devolved upon Charles, put an end to any dreams of private happiness that he may have been indulging; and his little romance was over.  How deep his passion was we are not likely ever to know; but Lamb thenceforward made very light of it, except in the pensive recollections in the essays twenty-five years later.  In November, 1796, when sending Coleridge poems for his second edition, he says:  “Do not entitle any of