Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to Bernard Barton, [16 May 1826]
DEAR B. B.—I
have had no spirits lately to begin a letter to you, though I am under
obligations to you (how many!) for your neat little poem. ’Tis just what
it professes to be, a simple tribute in chaste verse, serious and sincere. I do
not know how Friends will relish it, but we out-lyers, Honorary Friends, like
it very well. I have had my head and ears stuff’d up with the East winds.
A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some
raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying ![]()
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the 100th psalm? I get my music for
nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings.
Coleridge writing to me a week or
two since begins his note—“Summer has set in with its usual
Severity.” A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I
do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling hypocrites of
Mays wither me to death. My head has been a ringing Chaos, like the day the
winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a weathercock,
before the Quarters were made. In the street, with the blended noises of life
about me, I hear, and my head is lightened, but in a room the hubbub comes
back, and I am deaf as a Sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch Hood has done, which he calls Very Deaf Indeed? It is of a
good naturd stupid looking old gentleman, whom a footpad has stopt, but for his
extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants; the unconscious old
gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is
firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull
sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I chuse a very little bit of paper,
for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for I
miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises (almost
imperceptibly to you) in a silent reader. I seem too deaf to see what I read.
But with a touch or two of returning Zephyr my head will melt. What Lyes you
Poets tell about the May! It is the most ungenial part of the Year, cold
crocuses, cold primroses, you take your blossoms in Ice—a painted Sun— Unmeaning joy around appears, And Nature smiles as if she sneers. |
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It is ill with me when I begin to look which way the wind sits. Ten years
ago I literally did not know the point from the broad end of the Vane, which it
was the [? that] indicated the Quarter. I hope these ill winds have blowd over
you, as they do thro’ me. Kindest remembces to
you and yours.
Bernard Barton (1784-1849)
Prolific Quaker poet whose verse appeared in many of the literary annuals; he was an
acquaintance of Charles Lamb.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
English poet and humorist who wrote for the
London Magazine; he
published
Whims and Oddities (1826) and
Hood's
Magazine (1844-5).
