The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.

LETTER 284

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

20th March, 1822.

My dear Wordsworth—­A letter from you is very grateful, I have not seen a Kendal postmark so long!  We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John’s Loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish.  Deaths over-set one and put one out long after the recent grief.  Two or three have died within this last two twelvem’ths, and so many parts of me have been numbed.  One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other—­the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited.  It won’t do for another.  Every departure destroys a class of sympathies.  There’s Capt.  Burney gone!—­what fun has whist now? what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you?  One never hears any thing, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence.  Thus one distributes oneself about—­and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market.  Common natures do not suffice me.  Good people, as they are called, won’t serve.  I want individuals.  I am made up of queer points and I want so many answering needles.  The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious.  It takes so much from them as there was a common link.  A. B. and C. make a party.  A. dies.  B. not only loses A. but all A.’s part in C. C. loses A.’s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.  I express myself muddily, capite dolente.  I have a dulling cold.  My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.  I grow ominously tired of official confinement.  Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke.  You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or interposition.  Taedet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential clerk faces always in one’s dish.  O for a few years between the grave and the desk! they are the same, save that at the latter you are outside the machine.  The foul enchanter—­letters four do form his name—­Busirane is his name in hell—­that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath laid a heavier hand on me, not in present infliction, but in taking away the hope of enfranchisement.  I dare not whisper to myself a Pension on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have sucked me dry.  Otium cum indignitate.  I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder’s End—­emblematic name how beautiful! in the Ware road, there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking!

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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.