“[MOTTO]

“This Beauty, in the blossom of my Youth,
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,
Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,
In the best language my true tongue could tell me,
And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me,
I sued and served.  Long did I love this Lady.

“Massinger.”

“THE DEDICATION THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS, CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING IN LIFE’S MORE VACANT HOURS, PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY LOVE IN IDLENESS; ARE, WITH ALL A BROTHER’S FONDNESS, INSCRIBED TO MARY ANN LAMB, THE AUTHOR’S BEST FRIEND AND SISTER”

The dedication was printed as Lamb wished, in the form I have followed above, and the book appeared.

Page 8. When last I roved these winding wood-walks green,

This was sent to Coleridge on June 1, 1796, in a letter containing also the sonnets, “The Lord of Life,” page 16; “A timid grace,” page 8; and “We were two pretty babes,” page 9.  It was written, said Lamb, “on revisiting a spot, where the scene was laid of my 1st sonnet”—­“Was it some sweet device,” page 4.  Lamb printed this sonnet twice—­in 1797 and 1818.  Page 8. A timid grace sits trembling in her eye.

This, the last of the four love sonnets (see note on page 310), seems to be a survival of a discarded effort, for Lamb tells Coleridge, in the letter referred to in the preceding note, that it “retains a few lines from a sonnet of mine, which you once remarked had no ‘body of thought’ in it.”  Lamb printed this sonnet twice—­in 1797 and 1818.

Page 9. If from my lips some angry accents fell,

Lamb sent this sonnet, which is addressed to his sister, to Coleridge in May, 1796.  “The Sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry, but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house [an asylum] in one of my lucid Intervals.”  It is dated 1795 in Coleridge’s Poems.  Lamb printed the sonnet twice—­in 1797 and 1818.

Page 9. We were two pretty babes, the youngest she.

First printed in the Monthly Magazine, July, 1796.  “The next and last [wrote Lamb in the letter to Coleridge referred to in the notes on page 310] I value most of all.  ’Twas composed close upon the heels of the last [’A timid grace,’ page 8], in that very wood I had in mind when I wrote ‘Methinks how dainty sweet’ [page 5].”  It is dated 1795 in Coleridge’s Poems.  In the same letter Lamb adds:—­“Since writing it, I have found in a poem by Hamilton of Bangour [William Hamilton, 1704-1754, the Scotch poet, of Bangour, Linlithgowshire] these 2 lines to happiness:—­

      “Nun sober and devout, where art thou fled,
      To hide in shades thy meek contented head.

Lines eminently beautiful, but I do not remember having re’d ’em previously, for the credit of my 10th and 11th lines.  Parnell [Thomas Parnell, 1679-1718] has 2 lines (which probably suggested the above) to Contentment