ular among the little people, besides money. It's to bring
in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you'd think. [2]
These are the humble amusements we propose, while you are gone to plant
the cross of Christ among barbarous pagan anthropophagi. _Quam homo
homini praestat!_ but then, perhaps, you'll get murdered, and we shall
die in our beds, with a fair literary reputation. Be sure, if you see
any of those people whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, that
you make a draught of them. It will be very curious. Oh, Manning, I am
serious to sinking almost, when I think that all those evenings, which
you have made so pleasant, are gone perhaps forever. Four years you talk
of, maybe ten; and you may come back and find such alterations! Some
circumstances may grow up to you or to me that may be a bar to the
return of any such intimacy. I daresay all this is hum, and that all
will come back; but indeed we die many deaths before we die, and I am
almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone. I
have friends, but some of 'em are changed. Marriage, or some
circumstance, rises up to make them not the same. But I felt sure of
you. And that last token you gave me of expressing a wish to have my
name joined with yours, you know not how it affected me,--like a legacy.

God bless you in every way you can form a wish! May He give you health,
and safety, and the accomplishment of all your objects, and return you
again to us to gladden some fireside or other (I suppose we shall be
moved from the Temple). I will nurse the remembrance of your steadiness
and quiet, which used to infuse something like itself into our nervous
minds. Mary called you our ventilator. Farewell! and take her best
wishes and mine. Good by.

C.L.

[1] Addressed: "Mr, Manning, Passenger on Board the 'Thames,' East
Indiaman, Portsmouth." Manning had set out for Canton.

[2] Miss Lamb has amusingly described the progress of their labors on
this volume; "You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one
table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena, in the
'Midsummer Night's Dream;' or rather like an old literary Darby and
Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying he can
make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then
he finds out that he has made something of it."

XLVII.

TO WORDSWORTH.

_June_, 1806.

Dear Wordsworth,--We are pleased, you may b