Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/62

46 you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her manners are simple, ardent, and impressive. In every motion her innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say 'guilt was a thing impossible with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in minute observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer."

An accident had lamed Coleridge the very morning after Lamb's arrival, so that he was unable to share his friends' walks. He turned his imprisonment to golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us, as in a still lake, the beauty of the Quantock hills and vales where they were roaming, the scenes amid which these great and happy days of youth and poetry and friendship were passed. It is the very poem in the margin of which, eight and thirty years afterwards, Coleridge on his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for Charles and Mary Lamb.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

Beauties and feelings such as would have been

Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,

Friends whom I never more may meet again

On springy heath, along the hill-top edge

Wander in gladness and wind down, perchance,

To that still roaring dell of which I told;

The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,

And only speckled by the mid-day sun;

Where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock

Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,

Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves

Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,

Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends

Behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds,

That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)