DEAR Sir—You have misapprehended me sadly, if you
suppose that I meant to impute any inconsistency (in your writing poetry) with
your religious profession. I do not remember what I said, but it was spoken
sportively, I am sure. One of my levities, which you are not so used to as my
older friends. I probably was thinking of the light in which your so indulging
yourself would appear to Quakers, and put their objection in my own foolish
mouth. I would eat my words (provided they should be written on not very coarse
paper) rather than I would throw cold water upon your, and my once, harmless
occupation. I have read Napoleon and the rest with delight. I like them for what they are,
and for what they are not. I have sickened on the modern rhodomontade &
Byron-
| 572 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Sept. |
I am, like you, a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that gally thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood. If no imaginative poet, I am sure I am a figurative one. Do “Friends” allow puns? verbal equivocations?—they are unjustly accused of it, and I did my little best in the “imperfect Sympathies” to vindicate them.
I am very tired of clerking it, but have no remedy. Did you see a sonnet to this purpose in the Examiner?—
“Who first invented Work—and tied the
free And holy-day rejoycing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town— To plough—loom—anvil—spade—&, oh, most sad, To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood? Who but the Being Unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad Task ever plies ’mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel— For wrath Divine hath made him like a wheel— In that red realm from whence are no returnings; Where toiling and turmoiling ever and aye He, and his Thoughts, keep pensive worky-day.” C. L. |
I shall always be happy to see, or hear from you.—
