wearer, feel as if I had gone abroad the moment I put it on. It is, as usual, a production strange to me, the and the maker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or elevations. It requires a not quite innocent indifference, not to say insolence, to wear it. I expect the time when a man coat as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. will get his I think to come and see you next week, on Monday, if nothing hinders. By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. H. D. T. CHARLES LAMB TO WORDSWORTH, DECLINING AN INVITATION TO VISIT 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 care much 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, 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, coffeehouses, 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 the crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness 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 put 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) for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture 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 of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapes, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above as but a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind; and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna. Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play. C. L. WILLIAM COWPER TO JOSEPH HILL, DECLINING AN Dear Joe: INVITATION 1769. Sir Thomas crosses the Alps and Sir Cowper, for that is his title at Olney, prefers his home to any other spot of earth in the world. Horace, observing this difference of temper in different persons, cried out, a good many years ago, in the true spirit of poetry, "How much one man differs from another;" this does not seem a very sublime exclamation in English, but I remember we were taught to admire it in the original. My dear friend, I am obliged to you for your invitation; but being long accustomed to retirement, which I was always fond of, I am now more than ever unwilling to revisit those noisy and crowded scenes which I never loved and which I now abhor. I remember you with all the friendship I ever professed, which is as much as I ever entertained for any man. But the strange and uncommon incidents of my life have given an entire new turn to my whole character and conduct, and rendered me incapable of receiving pleasure from the same employments and amusements of which I could readily partake in former days. I love you and yours; I thank you for your continued remembrance of me, and shall not cease to be their and your Affectionate friend and servant, WM. COWPER. V. LETTER OF PRESENTATION ROBERT BURNS TO THE EARL OF BUCHAN (With a copy of "Bruce's Address to his troops at Bannockburn") My Lord: DUMFRIES, 12th January, 1794. Will your Lordship allow me to present you with the enclosed little composition of mine, as a small token of gratitude for the acquaintance with which you have been pleased to honor me. Independent of my enthusiasm as a Scotsman, I have rarely met with anything in history which interests my feelings as a man equal with the story of Bannockburn. On the one hand, a cruel but able usurper, leading on the finest army in Europe to extinguish the last spark of freedom among a greatly daring and greatly injured people; on the other hand, the desperate relics of a gallant nation devoting themselves to rescue their bleeding country, or perish with her. Liberty! thou art a prize truly and indeed valuable; for never canst thou be too dearly bought! ROBERT BURNS. VI. LETTERS OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT WHITTIER TO MISS ANDERSON, IN RECOGNITION OF HIS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION Dear Friend: AMESBURY, MASS., 12 Mo. 21, 1886. I heartily thank thee for thy interesting letter and the account of the hour devoted to myself and my writings in thy school. I am glad to know that the young folks so pleasantly remembered me on my birthday. I am very truly thy friend, JOHN G. WHITTIER. |