Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written.
C. LAMB, _Umbra_.
[1] Miss Elizabeth Benger. See "Dictionary of Nationai Biography,"
iv. 221.
XXXIV.
TO WORDSWORTH.
_January_, 1801.
Thanks for your letter and present. I had already borrowed your second
volume. [1] What pleases one most is "The Song of Lucy.". _Simon's sickly
Daughter_, in "The Sexton," made me _cry_. Next to these are the
description of these continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh,"
where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that
fine Shakspearian character of the "happy man" in the "Brothers,"--
"That creeps about the fields,
Following his fancies by the hour, to bring
Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles
Into his face, until the setting sun
Write Fool upon his forehead!"
I will mention one more,--the delicate and curious feeling in the wish
for the "Cumberland Beggar" that he may have about him the melody of
birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a
fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feeling for the
Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part
with the wish. The "Poet's Epitaph" is disfigured, to my taste, by the
common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse
epithet of "pin-point," in the sixth stanza.
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