ok with him to town in October. I wish they had been more,
and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what
I have told were of more value. But it is from such fragments of
recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for
biography must, for the most part, be collected.

=CHARLES LAMB=

1775-1834

TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

_Temporary frenzy_

27 _May_, 1796.

... Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through
at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant
spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat
rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary
my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were
told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw
you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem
in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish.... Coleridge! it may
convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you
in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined
to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.

TO THE SAME

_A friend in need_

_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.

... After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I
shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came
to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding
with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed
hope. You had

--many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;

I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
_Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through
the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you
left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life!' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwh