Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech,
Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain;
And my skull teems with notions infinite.
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach
Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen's vein,
And half had stagger'd that stout Stagirite!
You are not, Kelly, of the common strain,
That stoop their pride and female honour down
To please that many-headed beast the town,
And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain ;
By fortune thrown amid the actors' train,
You keep your native dignity of thought;
The plaudits that attend you come unsought,
As tributes due unto your natural vein.
Your tears have passion in them, and a grace
Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow;
Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace,
That vanish and return we know not how-
And please the better from a pensive face,
And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow.
TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE BLIND BOY." [Published originally in the Morning Chronicle, the following sonnet, like the preceding one, addressed to Miss Kelly, was reproduced some years afterwards, without authority, in Hone's Every-Day Book. Whereupon Charles Lamb addressed to the editor of that ingenious publication the following whimsical and wonderfully characteristic letter, half in denial, as will be seen, half in indignation, but at the last wholly in acknowledgment of the sonnet as his: "Dear Sir," he wrote,-" Somebody has fairly played a hoax on you (I suspect that pleasant rogue M-x-n) in sending the sonnet in my name, inserted in your last number. True it is that I must own to the verses being mine, but not written on the occasion there pretended; for I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the lady in the part of Emmeline, and I have understood that the force of her acting in it is in rather the expression of new-born sight than of the previous want of it. The lines were really written upon her performance in the Blind Boy, and appeared in the Morning Chronicle some years back. I suppose our facetious friend thought that they would serve again, like an old coat new turned.-Yours (and his nevertheless), C. LAMB."]
RARE artist! who with half thy tools, or none,
Canst execute with ease thy curious art,
And press thy powerful'st meanings on the heart,
Unaided by the eye, expression's throne!
While each blind sense, intelligential grown
Beyond its sphere, performs the effect of sight:
Those orbs alone, wanting their proper might,
All motionless and silent seem to moan
The unseemly negligence of nature's hand,
That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine,
O mistress of the passions; artist fine!
Who dost our souls against our sense command,
Plucking the horror from a sightless face,
Lending to blank deformity a grace.
TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS, PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF BARRY CORNWALL.
(London Magazine, September, 1820.)
LET hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask
Under the vizor of a borrow'd name;
Let things eschew the light deserving blame :
No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task.
Marcian Colonna " is a dainty book;
And thy "Sicilian Tale" may boldly pass;
Thy "Dream" 'bove all, in which, as in a glass,
On the great world's antique glories we may look.
No longer then, as "lowly substitute,
Factor, or PROCTOR, for another's gains,"
Suffer the admiring world to be deceived;
Lest thou thyself, by self of fame bereaved,
Lament too late the lost prize of thy pains,
And heavenly tunes piped through an alien flute.
WHO first invented work, and bound the free
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business in the green fields, and the town-
To plough, loom, anvil, spade-and oh! most sad,
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
Who but the being unblest, alien from good,
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad
Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,
That round and round incalculably reel-
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel-
In that red realm from which are no returnings:
Where toiling, and turmoiling ever and aye
He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day.
(London Magazine, April, 1821.)
THEY talk of time, and of time's galling yoke,
That like a mill-stone on man's mind doth press,
Which only works and business can redress:
Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,
Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke
But might I, fed with silent meditation,
Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation-
Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke-
I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit :
Fling in more days than went to make the gem,
That crown'd the white top of Methusalem:
Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,
Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,
The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.
DEUS NOBIS HÆC OTIA FECIT.
TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.
ROGERS, of all the men that I have known
But slightly, who have died, your Brother's loss
Touch'd me most sensibly. There came across
My mind an image of the cordial tone
Of your fraternal meetings, where a guest
I more than once have sat; and grieve to think,
That of that threefold cord one precious link
By Death's rude hand is sever'd from the rest.
Of our old Gentry he appear'd a stem-
A Magistrate who, while the evil-doer
He kept in terror, could respect the Poor,
And not for every trifle harass them,
As some, divine and laic, too oft do.
This man's a private loss, and public too.
THE GIPSY'S MALISON.
(Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1829.)
SUCK, baby, suck, mother's love grows by giving,
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;
Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.
Kiss, baby, kiss, mother's lips shine by kisses,
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;
Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses
Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings.
Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces,
Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;
Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging."
So sang a wither'd Beldam energetical,
And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.
ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.
QUEEN-BIRD that sittest on thy shining nest,
And thy young cygnets without sorrow hatchest,
And thou, thou other royal bird, that watchest
Lest the white mother wandering feet molest:
Shrined are your offspring in a crystal cradle,
Brighter than Helen's ere she yet had burst
Her shelly prison. They shall be born at first
Strong, active, graceful, perfect, swan-like, able
To tread the land or waters with severity.
Unlike poor human births, conceived in sin,
In grief brought forth, both outwardly and in
Confessing weakness, error, and impurity.
Did heavenly creatures own succession's line,
The births of heaven like to yours would shine.
WHAT reason first imposed thee, gentle name,
Name that my father bore, and his sire's sire,
Without reproach? we trace our stream no higher;
And I, a childless man, may end the same.
Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains,
In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks,
Received thee first amid the merry mocks
And arch allusions of his fellow swains.
Perchance from Salem's holier fields return'd,
With glory gotten on the heads abhorr'd
Of faithless Saracens, some martial lord
Took HIS meek title, in whose zeal he burn'd,
Whate'er the fount whence thy beginnings came,
No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name.
TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ., OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.
JOHN, you were figuring in the gay career
Of blooming manhood with a young man's joy,
When I was yet a little peevish boy-
Though time has made the difference disappear
Betwixt our ages, which then seem'd so great-
And still by rightful custom you retain,
Much of the old authoritative strain,
And keep the elder brother up in state.
O! you do well in this. 'Tis man's worst deed
To let the "things that have been run to waste,
And in the unmeaning present sink the past:
In whose dim glass even now I faintly read
Old buried forms, and faces long ago,
Which you, and I, and one more, only know.
[Prefixed to this sonnet in Moxon's edition of 1840 of Charles Lamb's Poems, there was given, upon p. 40, the following explanatory note from the author's own hand :—“ In a leaf of a quarto edition of the Lives of the Saints, written in Spanish by the learned and reverend father Alfonso Villegas, Divine of the Order of St. Dominick, set forth in English by John Heigham, Anno 1630, bought at a Catholic bookshop in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, I found, carefully inserted, a painted flower, seemingly coeval with the book itself; and did not for some time discover that it opened in the middle, and was the cover to a very humble draught of a Saint Anne, with the Virgin and Child; doubtless the performance of some poor but pious Catholic, whose meditations it assisted."]
O LIFT with reverent hand that tarnish'd flower,
That shrines beneath her modest canopy
Memorials dear to Romish piety;
Dim specks, rude shapes of saints. in fervent hour
The work perchance of some meek devotee,
Who, poor in worldly treasures to set forth
The sanctities she worshipp'd to their worth,
In this imperfect tracery might see
Hints, that all Heaven did to her sense reveal.
Cheap gifts best fit poor givers. We are told
Of the love mite, the cup of water cold,
That in their way approved the offerer's zeal.
True love shows costliest, where the means are scant;
And, in their reckoning, they abound, who want.
[The four following sonnets are, for the better completion of the series, transferred to this place by anticipation from the Album Verses, to which they more properly belong. His sonnets, however, being Charles Lamb's especial darlings, it has been thought advisable, as already intimated, that, as the poems begin with sonnets, the sonnets should be given here at once as a complete collection.]
IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAN].
A PASSING glance was all I caught of thee,
In my own Enfield haunts at random roving.
Old friends of ours were with thee, faces loving;
Time short and salutations cursory,
Though deep and hearty. The familiar name
Of you, yet unfamiliar, raised in me
Thoughts-what the daughter of that man should be
Who call'd our Wordsworth friend.
A growing Maiden, who, from day to day
Advancing still in stature, and in grace,
Would all her lonely father's griefs efface,
And his paternal cares with usury pay.
I still retain the phantom, as I can;
And call the gentle image-Quillinan.
TO DORA W[ORDSWORTH), ON BEING ASKED BY HER FATHER
TO WRITE IN HER ALBUM.
AN album is a banquet: from the store,
In his intelligential orchard growing,
Your sire might heap your board to overflowing;
One shaking of the tree-'twould ask no more
To set a salad forth, more rich than that
Which Evelyn in his princely cookery fancied :
Or that more rare, by Eve's neat hands enhanced,
Where a pleased guest, the angelic virtue sat.
But like the all-grasping founder of the feast,
Whom Nathan to the sinning king did tax,
From his less wealthy neighbours he exacts;
Spares his own flocks, and takes the poor man's beast.
Obedient to his bidding, lo, I am,
A zealous, meek, contributory--Lamb.
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