SOURCE: Wilson, D. G. “How Green Was My Elia?” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., 78 (April 1992): 185-92.

In the following essay, Wilson documents Lamb's literary responses to nature and the natural world.

I want to share with you some ideas about Lamb's character relating to his experience of nature and natural things, and the ways in which he wrote about them.

A love of the country is taken, I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues. It is one of those outlying qualities which are not exactly meritorious, but which, for that very reason, are the more provocative of a pleasing self-complacency. People pride themselves upon it as upon early rising, or upon answering letters by return of post … To say that we love the country is to make a claim to a similar excellence. We assert a taste for sweet and innocent...