its simplicity and its perfect Christian humility.

The

initials will be recognised as his customary designation of his name:

"Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
Oh, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.,
That he who many a year, with toil of breath,
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame-

He asked and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same.”

LECTURE XIII.

Southey.

(WITH NOTICE OF CHARLES LAMB.)

Charles Lamb, the friend of Coleridge and Southey-"The Old Familiar Faces"-"Elia"-Robert Southey-Character of his prose -His complete poetical works-His mental derangement-Personal interest of his poems Satirical power-"Wat Tyler"—

“Joan of Arc”- The product of imagination is often truth "Madoc"—"Roderic"-"Thalaba"-"The Curse of Kehama"Scriptural character of "Thalaba"-Keble's "Christian Year”— Story of "Thalaba and Oneiza" - Southey's Odes - -"The Retreat from Moscow"-"The Tale of Paraguay"-His playful poetryOde on the Portrait of Bishop Heber.

IN the last lecture it was my intention to give a few words, at the close, to an author whom I wished to notice briefly; but I became entangled in the witchery of "Christabel," and the glittering eye of "the Ancient Mariner" held me too long to let me accomplish my purpose. It was a life-long friend of Coleridge's I was anxious to speak of; and I must find room for him now, before proceeding to the chief subject of the present lecture. Let me, therefore, present Charles Lamb between his two friends Coleridge and Southey. His intimacy with Coleridge began within the venerable pre

cincts of Christ's Hospital, when they were blue-coat boys together in that time-honoured school. The friendship of boyhood, as is not usual, lasted into manhood and during life,—their minds, in many respects dissimilar, closely associated and identified. Coleridge died; and, in the brief interval of only a few months that Lamb survived, he was constantly reiterating, in a kind of soliloquy, and that confused state of feeling before we realize the absence in death of one whose presence has long been familiar, he was reiterating, "Coleridge is dead! Coleridge is dead!" A poet who knew and loved them both has coupled their names in the same stanzas of his elegy on his brother-bards :

:

"Nor has the rolling year twice measured

From sign to sign its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source.

"The rapt one of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature, sleeps in earth;

And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

"Like clouds that rake the mountain summit.
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother

From sunshine to the sunless land!"

The early poetical pieces of Lamb were first published with Coleridge's; and it was Coleridge, he said, who first kindled in him, if not the power, yet the love, of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness. Poetry was gradually given up by them both. "You," said Lamb

OLD FAMILIAR FACES.

129

to his friend, now devoted to his philosophy, now write no Christabels' nor " ( Ancient Mariners,' and I have dwindled into prose and criticism." One of the most pleasing pieces in the small collection of Lamb's poems may illustrate both the depth and tenderness of his feelings and the peculiarity of his way of thought. The verses have the merit of giving currency to a very feeling phrase, one of those happy combinations of words which poetry frequently incorporates into the language, serving to express some universal sentiment, and, therefore, soon acquiring the familiarity of a proverb. It cannot fail to be recognised, I think, as an expression of a feeling which has been experienced probably by every one who is now listening to me,—that painfully hollow sense of destitution when there comes across us the memory of faces familiar to some former period of life, -that desolate craving after the departed,--the missing of something which had been a portion of our very selves. Several of the stanzas go on to mention the memory of what has been and never more will be, and in language as simple as possible,-just such words as the feeling would express itself in, finding natural utterance in earnest conversation; but, as it is dwelt on, suddenly the imagination expands, and, as the shadowy recollections of childhood-memories of the old familiar faces throng around him, the living man, moved by a stronger sympathy with the past than with the present, nearer of kin, as it were, to the dead than to the living,-feels spectre-like visiting the scenes of his childhood, and, in the intensity of his loneliness, the earth becomes a very desert to him. The allusion in the latter part of the verses is to Coleridge :

"I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!

"I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!

"I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me; I must not see her:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

"I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate I left my friend abruptly,-
Left him to muse on the old familiar faces!

"Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood;
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

"Friend of my bosom! thou more than a brother!
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces!

"How some they have died, and how some they have left me,
And some are taken from me: all are departed:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!"

There is another set of verses of Lamb's, which very gracefully and feelingly, and with admirable truth and a certain indescribable sort of playful pathos, express the emotion, not amounting to strong grief, occasioned by the death of one who had been pleasantly known, and the perplexity of mind in associating the lately living with the grave: