A thorn, it needs not a sage to say, vexes the side of every human being.  Poetry laments the inadequacy of men to their ideals, philosophy declares an error in the figures which sum up life, religion reveals the fall of the race.  The thorn is known which pierced the matchless joyousness of Charles Lamb.  His family, highly gifted with wit, tenderness of feeling, and mutual love, had a tinge of madness in the blood.  At twenty years of age he was himself shut up six weeks in a madhouse, his imagination in a vagary.  He was not again affected; but the poison had sunk deeper into the veins of his sister.  The shadow of a deed done in the dark ever pursued her.  Charles devoted his life to her whose life was an intermittent madness, yet who, in her months of sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother.  His kindness to her knew no bounds.  It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home.  Charles Lloyd relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of them in tears.  In the smiles of Charles Lamb, and they were many, his friends always remarked a prevailing expression of sadness.  The “fair-haired maid,” who had been the theme of his first poetizing, appears not again in his verses or in his life.  He and Mary lived together, received evening visitors together, went to the theatre and picture-gallery together, visited the lakes and the poets together; and if he was ever seen in public without her, his friends knew there could be but one reason for it, and did not ask.  When he left the India House, he had reserved from his income a considerable sum for her support; though the liberality of his employers, as it proved, rendered this precaution unnecessary.  She was his partner in writing the Shakspearian tales, and he always affirmed that hers were better done than his own.  To her he dedicated the first poems that he published; and she, too, was a poetess, excellent in her simple way.  Thus was Charles Lamb’s life saddened by a great affliction ever impending over it, and sanctified by a great duty which he never for a moment forgot.

It was his good-fortune, while at school at Christ’s Hospital, to become acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  A timid boy, creeping around among his boisterous companions like a little monk, it was that soaring spirit which first taught him to look up.  Two men whose intellects more strongly contrasted could not be found.  Coleridge suffered throughout life from over-much speculation.  Could he have had his eye less upon the heavens and more upon the earth, could he have been concentrated upon some human duty, he would have been a much wiser and better man.  Even in his youth he was the rhapsodist of old philosophies, had resolved social life into its elements, and dreamed of putting it together again to suit himself on the