to Lamb's
letter, it is, indeed, hard to realise the fact that the "gentle-hearted
Charles," as Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter
to the "inspired charity-boy," for whom at an early period, and again at
the end, he had so profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and
every syllable must have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti's
attention to the surprising circumstance that in a letter written
immediately after the date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle
that he has never known Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so
happy before as _just then!_ There can hardly be a doubt, however,
that Rossetti's conjecture is a just one as to the origin of the great
passage in the second part of _Christabel_. Touching that passage I
called his attention to an imperfection that I must have perceived, or
thought I perceived long before,--an imperfection of craftsmanship that
had taken away something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties.
The passage ends--

They parted, ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt,
but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of
poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within
limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though
_frost_ might bring them together temporarily, _heat and thunder_ must
be powerless to make or to unmake the _marks_ that showed the cliffs to
have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, _heat_
(supposing _frost_ to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely
as a balancing phrase, and _thunder_ simply as the inevitable rhyme to
_asunder_. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have
been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any
serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
discounting. Rossetti replied:

Your geological strictures on Coleridge's "friendship"
passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But