assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.1

"Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself. And a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!

C. L."2 One does not wonder that Wordsworth in his lines, Written after the Death of Charles Lamb, owns:

"Thou wert a scorner of the fields, my friend,

But more in show than truth,"

for there came a third invitation to the prisoner to the "dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood," to come and see the hills and vales; this time alas! without promise of seeing Wordsworth, for Wordsworth was away, but with promise of sight of Skiddaw. The invitation was sent from Greta Hall early in August of 1802, and I expect it conveyed to Lamb and his sister Mary a promise that they shall not only see Calvert, but the Lloyds and Thomas Clarkson, the anti-slave philanthropist at Eusemere or Ullswater.

His account of what he saw and did may be gathered from his letter to Manning, dated 24th September, 1802: "I set out with Mary to Keswick without giving Coleridge any notice, for, my time being precious, did not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a small hill by the side

1 Wordsworth's poem, Joanna, which describes the effect of laughter echoing in the mountains.

2 Lamb's Letters, Vol. I., p. 212.

of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains, great floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains into colours, purple, etc. We thought we had got into fairy-land. But that went off (and it never came again; while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose that I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc., I never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment; gone to bed as it seemed for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Eolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed, etc. And all looking out upon the fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people, and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been in London, and past much time with us; he is now gone into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen Keswick,

Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater, I forget the name, to which we travelled on a very sultry day over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before; they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water she surmounted it most manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the Border countries, so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks, I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controuled by any one to come home and work. I felt very little. I had been dreaming I was a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand

are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness. After all I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know. Still Skiddaw is a fine creature."1

Skiddaw had asserted itself as a perpetual power in the London-loving mind. "I feel," wrote he to Coleridge of this visit, "that I shall remember your mountains to the last day that I live. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the lady." 2

And something else beside Skiddaw and its breezy view had charmed Lamb. The little two-year-old Derwent Coleridge in his yellow coat, "Stumpy Canary" as they called him, had won his heart side by side with David Hartley, the six-year-old philosopher; for Sara Coleridge tells us that Lamb was charmed with the little fellow, and much struck with the quickness of eye and memory displayed by him in naming the subjects of prints in books. "Pipos, Pitpos" was Derwent's name for the "striped opossum," and this he would utter with a nonchalant air, as much as to say, of course I know it all as pat as possible. Lamb always after that in his letters to Greta Hall asked after his friend "Pipos."

1 Lamb's Letters, Vol. I., p. 221.

2 Idem, Vol. I., p. 220.

CHAPTER III

GRETA HALL

THE SOUTHEYS COME TO GRETA HALL: DESCRIPTION OF THE HOUSE AND ITS HOUSEHOLD: CHARACTERISTICS OF ROBERT SOUTHEY : SOUTHEY AND COLERIDGE: SOUTHEY AND WORDSWORTH

IN that same month and year-September of 1802, when Lamb was writing his letters of thanks to Coleridge, and the account of his conversion to the charm of mountain scenery-there was born in Southey's home at Bristol, after some years of childlessness, "a little snub-nosed, grey-eyed thing," Margaret. If it was grief for the death of a clever child, Herbert," a boy whom every eye that looked on loved "-which afterwards enchained Southey in the Keswick Vale, it was, alas, the death of this little darling Margaret, in August of 1803, that drove him from Bristol to the North.

"Edith," wrote Southey, "will be nowhere so well as with her sister Coleridge. She has a little girl some six months old "-this was the Sara, the dark eyed Sara, sung of afterwards in Wordsworth's Triod, who was born at