The hour he passed with Lamb was one of unalloyed enjoyment.  A letter from Crabb Robinson before he came over had filled him with affection for that most lovable of men, who had not an infirmity to which his sweetness of nature did not give something of kinship to a virtue.  “I have just seen Charles and Mary Lamb,” Crabb Robinson had written (20th October, 1831), “living in absolute solitude at Enfield.  I find your poems lying open before Lamb.  Both tipsy and sober he is ever muttering Rose Aylmer.  But it is not those lines only that have a curious fascination for him.  He is always turning to Gebir for things that haunt him in the same way.”  Their first and last hour was now passed together, and before they parted they were old friends.  I visited Lamb myself (with Barry Cornwall) the following month, and remember the boyish delight with which he read to us the verses which Landor has written in the album of Emma Isola.  He had just received them through Robinson, and had lost little time in making rich return by sending Landor his Last Essays of Elia.

These were Landor’s verses:—­

        TO EMMA ISOLA

        Etrurian domes, Pelasgian walls,
          Live fountains, with their nymphs around
        Terraced and citron-scented halls,
          Skies smiling upon sacred ground—­

        The giant Alps, averse to France,
          Point with impatient pride to those,
        Calling the Briton to advance,
          Amid eternal rocks and snows—­

        I dare not bid him stay behind,
          I dare not tell him where to see
        The fairest form, the purest mind,
          Ausonia! that e’er sprang from thee,

and this is “Rose Aylmer";—­

        Ah what avails the sceptred race! 
          Ah what the form divine! 
        What every virtue, every grace! 
          Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
        Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
          May weep, but never see,
        A night of memories and of sighs
          I consecrate to thee.

Of the measureless Bethams Lamb wrote in similar terms, but more fully, in an article in the New Times in 1825, entitled “Many Friends” (see Vol.  I.).

On April 9, 1834, Landor wrote to Lady Blessington:—­

I do not think that you ever knew Charles Lamb, who is lately dead.  Robinson took me to see him.

        “Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,
        Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue
        Run o’er my heart, yet never has been left
        Impression on it stronger or more sweet. 
        Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,
        What wisdom in thy levity, what soul
        In every utterance of thy purest breast! 
        Of all that ever wore man’s form,’tis thee
        I first would spring to at the gate of Heaven.”