ocal terms
Besprinkled o'er thy rustic lay,
Though well such dialect confirms
Its power unletter'd minds to sway,
It is not _these_ that most display
Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,--
Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,
But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.

The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word
Horkey, which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a
character in one of Bloomfield's _Rural Tales_.

"Quaker Sonnets." Barton did not carry out this project. Southey's _Book
of the Church_ was published in 1824.

"I meditate a letter to S." The "Letter of Elia to Mr. Southey" was
published in the _London Magazine_ for October, 1823.]

LETTER 330

(_Fragment_)

CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES LLOYD

[No date. Autumn, 1823.]

Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg. They are
_sinuous_, and to be won with wrestling. I assure you in sincerity that
nothing you have done has given me greater satisfaction. Your obscurity,
where you are dark, which is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not
the painful obscurity which no toil of the reader can dissipate; not the
dead vacuum and floundering place in which imagination finds no footing;
it is not the dimness of positive darkness, but of distance; and he that
reads and not discerns must get a better pair of spectacles. I admire
every piece in the collection; I cannot say the first is best; when I do
so, the last read rises up in judgment. To your Mother--to your
Sister--to Mary dead--they are all weighty with thought and tender with
sentiment. Your poetry is like no other:--those cursed Dryads and Pagan
trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name
of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose; and I have
made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that your
present is rarely valued.

CHARLES LAMB.

[This scrap is in _Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard
Barton_, 1849, edited by Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton. Lloyd says:
"I had a very ample testimony from C. Lamb to the character of my last
little volume. I will transcribe to you what he says, as it is but a
note, and his manner is always so original, that I am sure the
introduction of the merest trifle from his pen will well compensate for
the absence of anything of mine." The volume was _Poems_, 1823, one of
the chief of w