my things Love Sonnets, as I told you to call ’em; ’twill only make me look little in my own eyes; for it is a passion of which I retain nothing....  Thank God, the folly has left me for ever.  Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me....”  Again, in November, 1796, in another letter to Coleridge, about his poems in the 1797 edition, Lamb says:  “Oh, my friend!  I think sometimes, could I recall the days that are past, which among them should I choose? not those ‘merrier days,’ not the ‘pleasant days of hope,’ not ’those wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid,’ which I have so often and so feelingly regretted, but the days, Coleridge, of a mother’s fondness for her school-boy.”  Lamb printed this sonnet three times—­in 1796, 1797 and 1818.

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Page 5. Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclin’d.

When this sonnet was printed by Coleridge in 1796 the sestet was made to run thus:—­

      But ah! sweet scenes of fancied bliss, adieu! 
      On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers
      I all too long have lost the dreamy hours! 
      Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo,
      If haply she her golden meed impart,
      To realise the vision of the heart.

Lamb remonstrated:  “I had rather have seen what I wrote myself, though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines—­

“On rose-leaf’d beds, amid your faery bowers, etc.

I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my Own feelings at different times.”  This sonnet was printed by Lamb three times—­in 1796, 1797 and 1798.

Page 5. O!  I could laugh to hear the midnight wind,

This sonnet, written probably at Margate, was entitled, in 1796, “Written at Midnight, by the Seaside, after a Voyage.”  The last lines then ran:—­

      And almost wish’d it were no crime to die! 
      How Reason reel’d!  What gloomy transports rose! 
      Till the rude dashings rock’d them to repose.

The couplet was Coleridge’s, and Lamb protested (June 10, 1796), describing them as good lines, but adding that they “must spoil the whole with me who know it is only a fiction of yours and that the rude dashings did in fact not rock me to repose.”

When reprinted in 1797, the final couplet was omitted, asterisks standing instead.  The present sonnet was probably the earliest of Lamb’s printed poems.  In the Elia essay “The Old Margate Hoy,” Lamb states that the first time he saw the sea was on a visit to Margate as a boy, by water—­probably the voyage that suggested this sonnet.  Lamb printed the sonnet three times—­in 1796, 1797 and 1818.

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Page 6.  LLOYD’S POEMS ON THE DEATH OF PRISCILLA FARMER, 1796.

Charles Lloyd (1775-1839), the son of Charles Lloyd, of Birmingham (a cultured and philanthropical Quaker banker), joined Coleridge at Bristol late in 1796 as his private pupil, and moved with the family to Nether Stowey.  Priscilla Farmer was Lloyd’s maternal grandmother, to whom he was much attached, and on her death he composed the sonnets that form this costly quarto, published for Lloyd by Coleridge’s friend, Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, in the winter of 1796.