In 1820, during a summer holiday at Cambridge, Lamb met an orphan girl, Emma Isola, then eleven years of age, whom he and Mary later adopted, and the letters have many references to the welcome companionship of Emma, who gave something of a new interest in life to the brother and sister.[4] In 1827 the household removed again, this time to the Chase, Enfield.  Two years later they gave up the house of their own and boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, their next-door neighbours.  In 1833 Mary, who had had frequently to be “from home,” as it has been euphemistically put, was under the charge of Mr. and Mrs. Walden at Bay Tree Cottage, Edmonton, when Charles decided to live under the same roof with her, even during her periods of mental derangement, and followed her thither, in

    The not unpeaceful evening of a day
    Made black by morning storms.

[Footnote 4:  Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, the publisher.]

How much Mary’s companionship meant to him may be gathered from an open-hearted letter which he had written in 1805 to Dorothy Wordsworth—­and it meant no less in the years that followed: 

I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so.  Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop.  All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation.  I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity.  To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing that I do from her.  She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness.  She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me.  She lives but for me.

On 25th July, 1834, Coleridge died, and the blow was a terrible one to Charles Lamb; “we die many deaths before we die,” he had said of the departure of friends; and the passing of Coleridge may be said to have come as a fatal shock, for he survived him but five months, and during that time was heard to say again and again, as though the fact were too stupendous to believe, not to be realized, “Coleridge is dead!” Taking his usual morning walk in the fourth week of December, Lamb stumbled and fell, bruising his face; the bruise did not seem serious, but erysipelas supervened, and on 27th December, 1834, the beloved friend, the noble man, passed into the great silence.  He was buried in Edmonton Churchyard, and there, nearly thirteen years later, was laid by him the dear sister who had so long watched over him, whom he had so long guarded.

* * * * *

“‘Saint Charles,’ said Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one of Charles Lamb’s letters to his forehead."[5]