don our not replying at length to her kind
letter? We are not quiet enough; Morgan is with us every day, going
betwixt Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is absent but four miles; and
the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty
ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his
genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or
the _Author of the "Excursion,"_ I should, in a very little time, lose
my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's
thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no
possible interruption further than what I may term _material!_ There is
not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in
the first page of Locke's "Treatise on the Human Understanding," or as
much poetry as in any ten lines of the "Pleasures of Hope," or more
natural "Beggar's Petition." I never entangle myself in any of their
speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have
dreadful. Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes
to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold
you a guinea you don't find the chasm where I left off, so excellently
the wounded sense closed again and was healed.

N.B.--Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal
presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any:
but I pay dearer: what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is
positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a
willing violence. As to your question about work, it is far less
oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances; it takes all the
golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; but it does
not kill my peace, as before. Some day or other I shall be in a taking
again. My head aches, and you have had enough, God bless you!

C. LAMB.

[1] Wordsworth's "Letter to a Friend of Burns" (London, 1816).

"Wordsworth had been consulted by a friend of Burns as to the best mode
of vindicating the reputation of the poet, which, it was alleged, had
been much injured by the publication of Dr. Carrie's 'Life and
Correspondence of Burns.'"--AINGER.

LXII.

TO H. DODWELL [1]

_July_, 1816.

My dear Fellow,--I have been in a lethargy this long while, and
forgotten London, Westminster, Marybone, Paddington,--they all went
clean out of my head, till happening to go to a nei