'
Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
compact,' poetry in substance?

Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--life
awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls,
parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the pr