rhythm, which of right belongs to the poetry of Coleridge in somewhat the same relation as a tune to a song, and without which it would not be a song.

"Yes! they wander on

In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered after Nature many a year,
In the great city pent, winning thy way

With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity . . . Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure,
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,
That we may lift the soul and contemplate
With lively joy, the joys we cannot share.
My gentle hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had crossed the mighty orb's dilated glory,
While thou stoodst gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant that tells of life."

I am wrong; I once There is nothing like

I have said that I never knew any one who at all approached or resembled our delightful housemate. met a man with his smile,—HIS smile. it upon earth; unless, perchance, this man survives. And yet how unlike in every other regard personal and mental; not that the man, who had by some most extraordinary means acquired or appropriated this sunshine of the face, was at all deficient in mental qualities. He seemed amiable, thoughtful, and introspective; a man better than his condition, or rather, his calling. He was, I believe, a stock-broker, and had been

with his son to traverse the haunts of his childhood, near Lymington; with his son, afflicted with a sudden and complete deafness; hence, perchance, these sweet smiles springing from, and compounded of, love and pain. Yet this man had never known Lamb; still his smile was the same-the self-same expression on a different face,-if, indeed, whilst that smile passed over it, you could see any difference. I mentioned this strange encounter to Coleridge, and he immediately constructed a most delightful theory of association, and corroborated it with so many instances, that he must have been sceptical that could at the moment have refused him credence. To those who wish to see the only thing left on earth, if it is still left, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful remain, his smile, I will indicate its possessor,-Mr. Harman, of Throgmorton Street.

Subjoined is a tribute of love and admiration from one least fitted by genius and intellectual sympathies to appreciate the loved being so much deplored. If, to this disciple of the useful and the prudent, Lamb appeared so worthy of homage, judge you what he was to me, and to a herd, each more worthy than I. If by a Scotchman, with whom as a nation and as individuals he acknowledged no sympathy, he was esteemed and reverenced, think what must be the loss to those better fitted, by position and by sympathy, to relish and enter into his opinions and pursuits. Contrast this tribute, forced as it were, from strange lips, with the reminiscences of one on whom all his kindness and self-devotion were lavished, and upon whom his charities both of mind and purse were poured out even to self-sacrifice, and then bear in mind that gratitude is a feeble flame, which needs constantly to be kept alive by a repetition of benefits, or that IN IMPROVIDENT NATURES it gives place to rancorous disparagement, even after death.

"One of the conductors of this journal did justice to a longcherished and deeply-rooted admiration of this writer, by making a kind of pilgrimage to his house at Edmonton, where a letter from a

mutual friend introduced him to the presence of one whom he would willingly have gone ten times farther to see. All stranger as he was, he had the gratification of experiencing a share—and he thought it a large one-of that kindness which Mr. Lamb had in store for all his fellow-creatures; and, after an hour's conversation, parted with the object of his journey near the famed ' Bell,' carrying with him a profound sense of the excellence of one of the finest model-beings whom it ever was his fortune to meet."—Chambers' Journal.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

LETTER VII.

Highgate, April 10th, 1820. May I venture to obtrude on you what I cannot intrust to a messenger, much less to the post. Sackville-street is not I hope more than fifteen or twenty minutes' walk from your house. It is to inquire if Mr. Caldwell is in town; if he be, then to leave the letter, and that is all; but if not, to learn whether he is at his living, and if so, then to transfer his present address to the letter, and put it into the nearest General Post Office box. It is of serious importance to Derwent that the inclosed should reach Mr. Caldwell with as little delay as possible, or I need not say that I should not have taxed your time and kindness merely to make a letter-carrier of you.

On Saturday evening I received a note from Mathews, which I have inclosed. I took it very kind of him; but to obtrude myself on Walter Scott, nolentem volentem, and within a furlong of my own abode, as he knows (for Mr. Frere told him my address), was a liberty I had no right to take; and though it would have highly gratified me to have conversed with a brother bard, and to have renewed on the mental retina the image of, perhaps, the most extraordinary man, assuredly the most extraordinary writer, of his age, yet I dared not purchase

the gratification at so high a price as that of risking the respect which I trust has not hitherto been forfeited by,

T. Allsop, Esq.

My dear friend,

Your obliged and very affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.

P.S. I had not the least expectation, yet I could not suppress a sort of fluttering hope, that my letter might have reached you on Saturday night, and that you might be disengaged and turn your walk Highgate-ward. You will be delighted with the affectionate attachment of the two brothers to each other, the boyish high spirits with manly independence of intellect, and, in one word, with the simplicity which is their nature, and the common ground on which the differences of their mind and characters (for no two can be more distinct) shoot and play. When I say that nothing can exceed their fondness for their father, I need not add that they are impatient to be introduced to you. And I can offer no better testimony of the rank you hold in my bosom, my dear Allsop, than the gladness with which I anticipate their becoming your friends, in the noblest sense of the word. Would to Heaven their dear sister were with us, the cup of paternal joy would be full to the brim! The rapture with which both Hartley and Derwent talk of her, quite affects Mrs. Gillman, who has always felt with a sort of lofty yet refined enthusiasm respecting the relations of an only sister to her brothers. Of all women I ever knew, Mrs. G. is the woman who seems to have been framed by Nature for a heroine in that rare species of love which subsists in a triunity of the heart, the moral sense, and the faculty, corresponding to what Spurzheim calls the organ of ideality. What in other women is refinement exists in her as by implication, and, à fortiori, in a native fineness of character. She often repre sents to my mind the best parts of the Spanish Santa Teresa, ladyhood of nature.

Vexation! and Mrs. Gillman has this moment burnt

Mathews' note. The purport, however, was as follows :-" I have just received a note from Terry, informing me that Sir Walter Scott will call upon me to-morrow morning (i. e. Sunday) at half-past eleven. Will you contrive to be here at the same time? Perhaps the promise of your company may induce Sir Walter to appoint a day on which he will dine with me before he returns to the north."

Now as Scott had asked Terry for my address on his first arrival in town, it is not impossible, though not very probable, that Terry may have said,-" You will meet Coleridge at Mathews's," though I was not entitled to presume this. The bottom of all this, my dear friend, is neither more nor less than as follows:-I seem to feel that I ought to feel more desire to see an extraordinary man than than I really do feel; and I do not wish to appear to two or three persons (as the Mr. Freres, William Rose, &c.), as if I cherished any dislike to Scott respecting the Christabel, and generally an increasing dislike to appear out of the common and natural mode of thinking and acting. All this is, I own, sad weakness, but I am weary of dyspathy.

In this last sentence may be read the whole secret of the writer's latter days. In thought, action, opinion, he always sought for harmony and agreement, and frequently created a harmony of his own. Hence his dislike of, and distaste for, the new sciences, so called, of Political Economy and the Utilitarian Philosophy, in which nothing is proved, nothing settled, and with respect to the very elements of which no two professors are agreed. When one of the self-sufficient of this last class, now so numerous as to infest, beset, and defile all places of public resort where anything is to be obtained, was controverting one of the more profound opinions of Coleridge, upon which he had brought to bear, but not exhausted, all the stores of a mind perfectly unequalled, both with respect to