HOW do you like this little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt.
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1
High-born Helen, round your
dwelling
These twenty years I’ve paced in vain:
Haughty beauty, your lover’s duty
Has been to glory in his pain.
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2
High-born Helen! proudly telling
Stories of your cold disdain;
I starve, I die, now you comply,
And I no longer can complain.
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3
These twenty years I’ve lived on tears,
Dwelling for ever on a frown;
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;
I perish now you kind are grown.
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4
Can I, who loved my Beloved
But for the “scorn was in her eye,”
Can I be moved for my Beloved,
When she “returns me sigh for sigh?”
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5
In stately pride, by my bed-side,
High-born Helen’s portrait’s hung;
Deaf to my praise; my mournful lays
Are nightly to the portrait sung.
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6
To that I weep, nor ever sleep,
Complaining all night long to her!
Helen, grown old, no longer
cold,
Said, ‘You to all men I prefer.”
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Godwin returned from Wicklow the week before last, tho’ he did not reach home till the Sunday after. He might much better have spent that time with you.—But you see your invitation would have been too late. He greatly regrets the occasion he mist of visiting you, but he intends to revisit Ireland in the next summer, and then he will certainly take Keswick in his way. I dined with the Heathen on Sunday.
| 184 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | August |
By-the-by, I have a sort of recollection that somebody, I think you, promised me a sight of Wordsworth’s Tragedy. I should be very glad of it just now; for I have got Manning with me, and should like to read it with him. But this, I confess, is a refinement. Under any circumstances, alone in Cold Bath Prison, or in the desert island, just when Prospero & his crew had set off, with Caliban in a cage, to Milan, it would be a treat to me to read that play. Manning has read it, so has Lloyd, and all Lloyd’s family; out I could not get him to betray his trust by giving me a sight of it. Lloyd is sadly deficient in some of those virtuous vices. I have just lit upon a most beautiful fiction of hell punishments, by the author of “Hurlothrumbo,” a mad farce. The inventor imagines that in hell there is a great caldron of hot water, in which a man can scarce hold his finger, and an immense sieve over it, into which the probationary souls are put.
“And all the little souls Pop through the riddle holes.” |
Mary’s love to Mrs. Coleridge—mine to all.
N.B.—I pays no Postage.—
George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with. The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself. If I could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would write a novel on purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off to a hair.
George brought a Dr. Anderson to see me. The Doctor is a very
pleasant old man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his
breeches-knees with Packthread, & boasts of having had disappointments from
ministers. The Doctor happened to mention an Epic Poem by one Wilkie, called the “Epigoniad,” in which he assured us
there is not one tolerable line from beginning to end, but all the characters,
incidents, &c., are verbally copied from Homer. George, who had been sitting quite
inattentive to the Doctor’s criticism, no sooner heard the sound of
Homer strike his
pericraniks, than up he gets, and declares he must see that poem immediately:
where was it to be had? An epic poem of 800 [? 8,000] lines, and he not hear of
it! There must be some things good in it, and it was necessary he should see
it, for he had touched pretty deeply upon that subject in his criticisms on the
Epic. George has touched pretty deeply upon the Lyric, I
find; he has also prepared a dissertation on the Drama and the comparison of
the English and German theatres. As I rather doubted his competency to do the
latter, knowing that his peculiar turn lies in the lyric
species of composition, I questioned George what English
plays he had read.
| 1800 | COTTLE’S GUINEA EPIC | 185 |
