[Footnote 5:  Edward FitzGerald’s “Letters.”]

HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS

The writings of Charles Lamb fall more or less naturally into four or five groups—­with, of course, inevitable overlappings—­and it is better to consider them thus, rather than in the strict order of their production.

POETRY

It was in poetry that he made his first essays, as we have seen, and this is not to be wondered at in one who had early read the old poetic treasures of our literature, and in the close companion of so deeply poetic a man as Coleridge.  He was, indeed, himself essentially a poet, though his work in verse falls far below that which he achieved in prose.  The perusal of a slim volume of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles was the small occasion from which sprang the great event of Lamb’s and Coleridge’s commencing to write poetry.  To the sonnet form Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most felicitously, for two or three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which makes them remain in the mind.  This one, with its familiar close, may stand as representative of the days when Bowles was still the god of his poetic idolatry: 

    The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,
      And ’gins to sprinkle on the earth below
      Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;
    Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,
    I turn my back on thy detested walls,
      Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind,
      A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;
    Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.

    I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,
      That minded me of many a pleasure gone,
      Of merrier days, of love and Islington;
    Kindling afresh the flames of past desire. 
      And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on
    To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.

In his blank verse—­and couplets—­of the same period, the time when he was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in this form “On His Recovery from an Indisposition").  These, however, were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less conscious imitation, and Lamb was not long in finding his feet and indicating his peculiar individuality.  He had learned much from the free expressions of the old dramatic poets, and in such pieces as “The Old Familiar Faces”—­a poignant cry from a suffering soul—­or in his unconventional sonnet, “The Gipsy’s Malison,” written more than thirty years later, we have some of the most markedly individual of his poems.  He was not a poet, he declared—­running counter to the judgement of some of his later critics—­but essentially a prosaic writer.  All that he wrote in verse, apart from the plays, would come within