LETTER 260

CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (_Incomplete_)

[May 25, 1820.]

Dear Miss W.--There can be none to whom the last volume of W. W. has come more welcome than to me. I have traced the Duddon in thought and with repetition along the banks (alas!) of the Lea--(unpoetical name); it is always flowing and murmuring and dashing in my ears. The story of _Dion_ is divine--the genius of Plato falling on him like moonlight--the finest thing ever expressed. Then there is _Elidure_ and _Kirkstone Pass_--the last not new to me--and let me add one of the sweetest of them all to me, _The Longest Day_. Loving all these as much as I can love poetry new to me, what could I wish or desire more or extravagantly in a new volume? That I did not write to W. W. was simply that he was to come so soon, and that flattens letters....

Yours, C. L.

[I print from Professor Knight's text, in his _Life of Wordsworth_. Canon Ainger supplies omissions--a reference to Martin Burney's black eye.

The Wordsworths were in town this summer, to attend the wedding of Thomas Monkhouse and Miss Horrocks. We know from Crabb Robinson's _Diary_ that they were at Lamb's on June 2: "Not much was said about his [W. W.'s] new volume of poems. But he himself spoke of the 'Brownie's Cell' as his favourite." The new volume was _The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets_, ... 1820. "The Longest Day" begins:--

Let us quit the leafy arbour.

Between this letter and the next Lamb wrote and sent off his first contribution to the _London Magazine_ over the signature Elia--"The South-Sea House," which was printed in the number for August, 1820.]