Abbey" in the first.

C. L.

[1] Of the "Lyrical Ballads" then just published. For certain results of
Lamb's strictures in this letter, see Letter xxxvii.

XXXV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

_January_ 30, 1801.

I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, 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 you
mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the
Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers; coaches, wagons, playhouses; 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-book stalls, parsons cheapening books;
coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens; the pantomimes, 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. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural
emotions to me. But consider what must I have been doing all my life,
not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

My attachments are all local, purely local,--I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was bom,
the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase
which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in
knowledge), wherever I have moved; old chairs, old tables; streets,
squares, where I have sunned myself; my old school,--these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you.
I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with
anything. Your sun and moon, and skies and hills and lakes, affect me no
more or scarcely co