C. L.
[1] Of the "Lyrical Ballads" then just published. For certain results of
Lamb's strictures in this letter, see Letter xxxvii.
XXXV.
TO WORDSWORTH.
_January_ 30, 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never
see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I
have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you
mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the
Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers; coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the
night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the
very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements; the
print-shops, the old-book stalls, parsons cheapening books;
coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens; the pantomimes, London
itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves
into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me.
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