Mary Lamb

The spring of 1833 brought to Charles and Mary only the return of dark days. Lamb writes to Wordsworth: —

"Your letter, save in what respects your dear sister's health, cheered me in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing: nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration, – shocking as they were then to me. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. Walden's and his wife [at Edmonton], who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of her: alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear it.

"To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance has happened (cujus pars magna fui), and which at another crisis I should have more rejoiced in. I am about to lose my old and only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the 'youth of our house,' – Emma Isola. I have her here now for a little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make short visits – be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval and more than concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of August. So 'perish the roses and the flowers!' – how is it?

"Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods and I am with attentive people and younger. I am three or four miles nearer the great city; coaches half price less and going always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there, one or two, though, most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining… I am feeble but cheerful in this my genial hot weather. Walked sixteen miles yesterday. I can't read much in summer-time."

There was no sense of being "pulled up by the roots" now in these removals. Lamb had and could have no home since she who had been its chief pride was in perpetual banishment from him and from herself. The following notelet which Talfourd, in his abundance, probably did not think worth publishing, at any rate shows with mournful significance how bitter were his recollections of Enfield, to which they had gone full of hope. It was written to Mr. Gillman's eldest son, a young clergyman, desirous of the incumbency of Enfield: —

"By a strange occurrence we have quitted Enfield for ever! Oh! the happy eternity! Who is Vicar or Lecturer for that detestable place concerns us not. But Asbury, surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to get you a Mover and Seconder, and you may use my name freely to him. Except him and Dr. Creswell, I have no respectable acquaintance in the dreary village. At least my friends are all in the public line, and it might not suit to have it moved at a special vestry by John Gage at the Crown and Horseshoe, licensed victualler, and seconded by Joseph Horner of the Green Dragon, ditto, that the Rev. J. G. is a fit person to be Lecturer, &c.

"My dear James, I wish you all success, but am too full of my own emancipation almost to congratulate anyone else."

Miss Isola's wedding-day came, and still Mary's mind was under eclipse; but the announcement of the actual event restored her as by magic; and here is her own letter of congratulation to the bride and bridegroom, – the last from her hand: —

"My Dear Emma and Edward Moxon,

"Accept my sincere congratulations and imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into good, set words. The dreary blank of unanswered questions which I ventured to ask in vain, was cleared up on the wedding-day by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance, begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon's health. It restored me from that moment, as if by an electric shock, to the entire possession of my senses. I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my eyes and all care from my heart."

To which beautiful last words Charles adds: —

"Dears again – Your letter interrupted a seventeenth game at picquet which we were having after walking to Wright's and purchasing shoes. We pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon. Never was such a calm or such a recovery. 'Tis her own words undictated."

Not Tasso only was attacked, but even Dante. "You will be amused to hear," he tells Carey, "that my sister and I have, with the aid of Emma, scrambled through the Inferno by the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation. I think we scarce left anything un-made-out. But our partner has left us and we have not yet resumed. Mary's chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to you."

The year 1834, the last of Lamb's life, opened gloomily. Early in February was written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his utterances concerning Mary. With the exception of a brief, mournful allusion to her in his latest letter to Wordsworth these were his last written words about her, and they breathe the same tenderness and unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long struggle and endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. The letter is to Miss Fryer, an old school-fellow of Emma Isola: – "Your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover Street [the Moxons]. I see them pretty often. In one word, be less uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths of desolation as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me to be left to my sister. When she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone over it. I could be nowhere happier than under the same roof with her. Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may so call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of names and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally live again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain, with the vividness of real presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the Waldens, as a dream, sense and nonsense, truth and errors huddled together, a medley between inspiration and possession. What things we are! I know you will bear with me talking of things. It seems to ease me, for I have nobody to tell these things to now…"

A week later was written that last little letter to Wordsworth (the reader will recognize Louisa Martin – Monkey – so prettily described in Lamb's first letter to Hazlitt): – "I write from a house of mourning. The oldest and best friends I have left are in trouble. A branch of them (and they of the best stock of God's creatures, I believe) is establishing a school at Carlisle. Her name is Louisa Martin. For thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour I would stake my soul. Oh! if you could recommend her, how would I love you – if I could love you better! Pray, pray recommend her. She is as good a human creature – next to my sister, perhaps, the most exemplary female I ever knew. Moxon tells me you would like a letter from me; you shall have one. This I cannot mingle up with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from C. Lamb. Poor Mary is ill again, after a short, lucid interval of four or five months. In short, I may call her half dead to me. Good you are to me. Yours, with fervour of friendship, for ever."

The dearest friend of all, Coleridge, long in declining health – the "hooded eagle, flagging wearily," was lying this spring and summer in his last painful illness – heart disease chiefly, but complicated with other sources of suffering – borne with heroic patience. Thoughts of his youth came to him, he said, 'like breezes from the Spice islands;' and under the title of that poem written in the glorious Nether Stowey days when Charles was his guest, —This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, – he wrote a little while before he died: —

Charles and Mary Lamb,Dear to my heart, yea, as it were my heartS. T. C. Æt. 63, 183417971834—37 years!

He drew his last breath on the 25th of July. At first Lamb seemed wholly unable to grasp the fact that he was gone. "Coleridge is dead!" he murmured continually, as if to convince himself. He 'grieved that he could not grieve.' "But since," he wrote in that beautiful memorial of his friend – the last fragment shaped by his hand – "but since, I feel how great a part of me he was. His great and dear spirit haunts me… He was my fifty-year old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see it again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gillman's more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel."

A month after this was written Charles Lamb followed his friend. A seemingly slight accident, a fall which wounded his face, brought on erysipelas, and he sank rapidly, dying the 27th December 1834. For once, Mary's affliction befriended her. Though her mind was not wholly obscured at the time, for she was able to show the spot in Edmonton churchyard where her brother had wished to be buried, yet it was so far deadened that she was unable to comprehend what had befallen her; and thus she remained for nearly a year.

None thought of Mary with tenderer sympathy than Landor, or strove with more sincerity to offer "consolation to the finest genius that ever descended on the heart of woman," as he fervently described her. "When I first heard of the loss that all his friends, and many that never were his friends, sustained in him," he wrote to Crabb Robinson, "no thought took possession of my mind except the anguish of his sister. That very night, before I closed my eyes, I composed this: —

TO THE SISTER OF CHARLES LAMBComfort thee, O thou mourner! yet awhileAgain shall Elia's smileRefresh thy heart, whose heart can ache no more.What is it we deplore?He leaves behind him, freed from grief and years,Far worthier things than tears,The love of friends without a single foe;Unequalled lot below!His gentle soul, his genius, these are thine;Shalt thou for these repine?He may have left the lowly walks of men;Left them he has: what then?Are not his footsteps followed by the eyesOf all the good and wise?Though the warm day is over, yet they seekUpon the lofty peakOf his pure mind, the roseate light that glowsO'er death's perennial snows.Behold him! From the spirits of the blestHe speaks: he bids thee rest.

About a month after her brother's death, their faithful old friend, Crabb Robinson, went to see Mary. "She was neither violent nor unhappy," he wrote in his diary, "nor was she entirely without sense. She was, however, out of her mind, as the expression is, but she could combine ideas, though imperfectly. On my going into the room where she was sitting with Mr. Walden, she exclaimed, with great vivacity, 'Oh! here's Crabby.' She gave me her hand with great cordiality, and said, 'Now this is very kind – not merely good-natured, but very, very kind to come and see me in my affliction.' And then she ran on about the unhappy, insane family of my old friend – . Her mind seemed to turn to subjects connected with insanity as well as to her brother's death. She spoke of Charles, of his birth, and said that he was a weakly but very pretty child."

In a year's time she was herself once more; calm, even cheerful; able, now and then, to meet old friends at the Moxons'. She refused to leave Edmonton. "He was there asleep in the old churchyard, beneath the turf near which they had stood together, and had selected for a resting-place; to this spot she used, when well, to stroll out mournfully in the evening, and to this spot she would contrive to lead any friend who came in summer evenings to drink tea, and went out with her afterwards for a walk." Out of very love she was content to be the one left alone; and found a truth in Wordsworth's beautiful saying, that "a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation, in course of time, springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkle the turf."

Lucid intervals continued, for a few years longer, to alternate with ever-lengthening periods of darkness. That mysterious brain was not even yet wholly wrecked by the eighty years of storms that had broken over it. Even when the mind seemed gone the heart kept some of its fine instincts. She learned to bear her solitude very patiently, and was gentle and kind always. Towards 1840 her friends persuaded her to remove to Alpha Road, St. John's Wood, that she might be nearer to them. Thirteen years she survived her brother, and then was laid in the same grave with him at Edmonton, May 28th, 1847; a scanty remnant of the old friends gathering round, – "Martin Burney refusing to be comforted."

Coleridge looked upon Lamb "as one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything." Or, as he himself once, with infinite sweetness, put it, "Poor Elia does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful indeed for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." Of Mary it may be said that she hoped all things and feared nothing, – wisest, noblest attitude of the human soul toward the Unknown.

LIST OF AUTHORITIES

Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb. Edited by Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., F.S.A. 1876.

The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by Charles Kent [in which, for the first time, the dates and original mode of publication were affixed to the Essays, &c.]. 1878.

Poetry for Children, by Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by Richard Herne Shepherd. 1878.

Mrs. Leicester's School, by Charles and Mary Lamb.

Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb. 1807.

Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Talfourd. 1848.

Charles Lamb: A Memoir, by Barry Cornwall. 1866.

Mary and Charles Lamb, by W. Carew Hazlitt. 1874.

My Friends and Acquaintance, by P. G. Patmore. 1854.

Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of Coleridge, by Thomas Allsop. Third edition. 1864.

Early Recollections of Coleridge, by J. Cottle. 1837.

Biographia Literaria, by Coleridge. Second edition. 1847.

Life of Coleridge, by Gillman. Vol. I. 1838.

Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edited by her Daughter. 1873.

Life of Wordsworth, by Rev. Dr. C. Wordsworth. 1851.

A Chronological List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, preceded by an Essay on Lamb, and List of his Works, by Alex. Ireland; printed for private circulation. (The copy used contains many MS. additions by the Author.) 1868.

Recollections of Writers, by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. 1878.

Six Life Studies of Famous Women, by M. Betham Edwards. 1880.

Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb-Robinson. Edited by Dr. Sadler. 1869.

Memoir of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt. 1867.

Spirit of the Age. & Table Talk, by Hazlitt. 1825, 1826.

Autobiographical Sketches. & Lakes and Lake Poets. by De Quincey. 1863.

William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, by Kegan Paul. 1876.

1

Hippomane Mancinella, one of the Euphorbiaceæ, a native of South America.