ly pictured in that impressive moral
picture, "The good man at the hour of death." I have in trust to put in
the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which
I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before
spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these letters may be
waste paper. I don't know why I have foreborne writing so long; but it
is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide
oceans. And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting
before me at our fireside just as if you had never been away. In such an
instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of
imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space! I'll promise you
good oysters. Cory is dead, that kept the shop opposite St. Dunstan's,
but the tougher materials of the shop survive the perishing frame of its
keeper. Oysters continue to flourish there under as good auspices. Poor
Cory! But if you will absent yourself twenty years together, you must
not expect numerically the same population to congratulate your return
which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away. Have you
recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you must
have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was
living at St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas,--like
finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are
nothing in our Western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try
what your presence can.

God bless you! Your old friend,

C. LAMB.

LX.

TO WORDSWORTH

_April_ 9, 1816.

Dear Wordsworth,--Thanks for the books you have given me, and for all
the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the "Political Sonnets"
and "Ode" according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet;
I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain
and chain them to my shelves, more _Bodleiano_, and people may come and
read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow;
some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to
read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my
money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this
caprice or wantonness of alienation in them; when they borrow my money
they never fail to make use of it, Coleridge has been here about a
fortnight. His health is tolerable at