LETTER 368

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Colebrook Cottage,

6 April, 1825.

Dear Wordsworth, I have been several times meditating a letter to you concerning the good thing which has befallen me, but the thought of poor Monkhouse came across me.  He was one that I had exulted in the prospect of congratulating me.  He and you were to have been the first participators, for indeed it has been ten weeks since the first motion of it.

Here I am then after 33 years slavery, sitting in my own room at 11 o’Clock this finest of all April mornings a freed man, with L441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at 90.  L441, i.e.  L450, with a deduction of L9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the Pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, &c.

I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week.  The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelm’d me.  It was like passing from life into Eternity.  Every year to be as long as three, i.e. to have three times as much real time, time that is my own, in it!  I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not.  But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift.  Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys:  their conscious fugitiveness—­the craving after making the most of them.  Now, when all is holyday, there are no holydays.  I can sit at home in rain or shine without a restless impulse for walkings.  I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master, as it has been irksome to have had a master.  Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us.

Leigh Hunt and Montgomery after their releasements describe the shock of their emancipation much as I feel mine.  But it hurt their frames.  I eat, drink, and sleep sound as ever.  I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither, but take things as they occur.  Yesterday I excursioned 20 miles, to day I write a few letters.  Pleasuring was for fugitive play days, mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive.  Freedom and life co-existent.

At the foot of such a call upon you for gratulation, I am ashamd to advert to that melancholy event.  Monkhouse was a character I learnd to love slowly, but it grew upon me, yearly, monthly, daily.  What a chasm has it made in our pleasant parties!  His noble friendly face was always coming before me, till this hurrying event in my life came, and for the time has absorpt all interests.  In fact it has shaken me a little.  My old desk companions with whom I have had such merry hours seem to reproach me for removing my lot from among them.  They were pleasant creatures, but to the anxieties of business, and a weight of possible worse ever impending, I was