Dear Miss
Hutchinson, I subscribe most willingly to all my sister says of her
Enjoyment at Cambridge. She was in silent raptures all the while there, and
came home riding thro’ the air (her 1st long outside journey) triumphing
as if she had been graduated. I remember one foolish-pretty expression she made
use of, “Bless the little churches how pretty they are,” as
those symbols of civilized life opened upon her view one after the other on
this side Cambridge. You cannot proceed a mile without starting a steeple, with
its little patch of villagery round it, enverduring the waste. I don’t
know how you will pardon part of her letter being a transcript, but writing to
another Lady first (probably as the easiest task*) it
was unnatural not to give you an accot of what had so
freshly delighted her, and would have been a piece of transcendant rhetorick
(above her modesty) to have given two different accounts of a simple and
univocal pleasure. Bless me how learned I write! but I always forget myself
when I write to Ladies. One
| 476 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | 1815 |
Our kindest loves to Joanna, if she will accept it from us who are merely nominal to her, and to the child and child’s parent. Yours again
* “Easiest Task.” Not the true reason, but Charles had so connected Coleridge & Cambridge in my mind, by talking so much of him there, and a letter coming so fresh from him, in a manner that was the reason I wrote to them first. I make this apology perhaps quite unnecessarily, but I am of a very jealous temper myself, and more than once recollect having been offended at seeing kind expressions which had particularly pleased me in a friend’s letter repeated word for word to another—Farewell once more.
