SUNDAY MORNING.—You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a pot girl. You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most splendid ornament of Southey’s poem all this cock and a bull story of Joan the publican’s daughter of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode of a waggoner, his wife, and six children; the texture will be most lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these addenda are, no doubt, in their way, admirable, too; but many would prefer the Joan of Southey.
“On mightiest deeds to brood Of shadowy vastness,
such as made my heart Throb fast. Anon I paused, and in a state Of half
expectance listen’d to the wind;” “They
wonder’d at me, who had known me once A chearful careless
damsel;” “The eye, That of the circling throng and of the
visible world Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy;” I see
nothing in your description of the Maid equal to these. There is a fine
originality certainly in those lines—“For she had lived in this bad
world as in a place of tombs, And touch’d not the pollutions of the
Dead”—but your “fierce vivacity” is a faint
copy of the “fierce & terrible benevolence” of Southey. Added to this, that it will look like
rivalship in you, & extort a comparison with S,—I
think to your disadvantage. And the lines, consider’d in themselves as an
addition to what you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but
such as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods, at such times as
she has met Noll Goldsmith, &
walk’d and talk’d with him, calling him old acquaintance.
Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with you
in the sublime of poetry; but he tells a plain tale better than you. I will
enumerate some woeful blemishes, some of ’em sad deviations from that
simplicity which
| 90 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Feb. |
| 1797 | JOHN WOOLMAN’S JOUBNAL | 91 |
Sunday Night.—You & Sara are very good to think so kindly & so favourably of
poor Mary. I would to God all did so too.
But I very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father’s
lifetime. It is very hard upon her. But our circumstances are peculiar, &
we must submit to them. God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her
situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest
creature to me when I was at school; who used to toddle there to bring me fag,
when I, school-boy like, only despised her for it, & used to be ashamed to
see her come & sit herself down on the old coal hole steps as you went into
the old grammar school, & opend her apron & bring out her bason, with
some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me—the good old creature is now
lying on her death bed. I cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. To the
shock she received on that our evil day, from which she never completely
recovered, I impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come
home to die with me. I was always her favourite: “No after friendship
e’er can raise The endearments of our early days, Nor e’er the
heart such fondness prove, As when it first began to love.”
Lloyd has kindly left me for a
keep-sake, John Woolman.
You have read it, he says, & like it. Will you excuse one short extract? I
think it could not have escaped you:—“Small treasure to a resigned
mind is sufficient. How happy is it to be content with a little, to live in
humility, & feel that in us which breathes out this language—Abba!
Father!” I am almost ashamed to patch up a letter in this
miscellaneous sort; but I please myself in the thought, that anything from me
will be acceptable to you. I am rather impatient, childishly so, to see our
names affixed to the same common volume. Send me two, when it does come out; 2
will be enough—or indeed 1—but 2 better. I have a dim recollection that, when
in town, you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for
a long poem. Why not adopt it, Coleridge? there would be room for imagination. Or the description
(from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the planets (the Moon,
| 92 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Feb. |
Monday Morn.—“A London letter. 9½.” Look
you, master poet, I have remorse as well as another man, & my bowels can
sound upon occasion. But I must put you to this charge, for I cannot keep back
my protest, however ineffectual, against the annexing your latter lines to
those former—this putting of new wine into old bottles. This my duty done, I
will cease from writing till you invent some more reasonable mode of
conveyance. Well may the “ragged followers of the nine” set
up for flocci-nauci-what-do-you-call-’em-ists! And I do not wonder that
in their splendid visions of Utopias in America they protest against the
admission of those yellow-complexioned, copper-color’d, white-liver’d Gentlemen, who never proved themselves their friends.
Don’t you think your verses on a Young Ass too trivial a companion for the Religious Musings?
“Scoundrel monarch,” alter that; and the Man of Ross is scarce admissible as
it now stands curtailed of its fairer half: reclaim its property from the Chatterton, which it does but
encumber, & it will be a rich little poem. I hope you expunge great part of
the old notes in the new edition. That, in particular, most barefaced unfounded
impudent assertion, that Mr. Rogers is
indebted for his story to Loch
Lomond, a poem by Bruce! I
have read the latter. I scarce think you have. Scarce anything is common to
them both. The poor author of the Pleasures of Memory was sorely hurt,
Dyer says, by the accusation of
unoriginality. He never saw the Poem. I long to read your Poem on Burns; I retain so indistinct
a memory of it. In what shape and how does it come into public? As you leave
off writing poetry till you finish your Hymns, I suppose you print now all you
have got by you. You have scarce enough unprinted to make a 2d volume with
Lloyd. Tell me all about it. What is
become of Cowper?
Lloyd told me of some verses on
| 1797 | COWPER AGAIN | 93 |
