Of pretty babes, that lov'd each other dear, Ev'n so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart! In the London Magazine the sentence referring to Mrs. Siddons in "Isabella" ran: "as it might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which (with unmixed perception)," &c. Page 100. DREAM-CHILDREN. London Magazine, January, 1822. John Lamb died on October 26, 1821, leaving all his property to his brother. Charles was greatly upset by his loss. Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822, he said: "We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John's Loss. Deaths over-set one, and put one out long after the recent grief." (His friend Captain Burney died in the same month.) Lamb probably began "Dream-Children,"-in some ways, I think, his most perfect prose work-almost immediately upon his brother's death. The essay "My Relations" (page 70) may be taken in connection with this as completing the picture of John Lamb. His lameness was caused by the fall of a stone in 1796, but I doubt if the leg were really amputated. The description in this essay of Blakesware, the seat of the Plumers, is supplemented by the essay on page 153, entitled "Blakesmoor in H——shire” (see notes). Except that Lamb substitutes Norfolk for the nearer county, the description is accurate; it is even true that there is a legend in the Plumer family concerning the mysterious death of two children and the loss of the baronetcy thereby-Sir Walter Plumer, who died in the seventeenth century, being the last to hold the title. In his poem "The Grandame (see Vol. V., page 5), Lamb refers to Mrs. Field's garrulous tongue and her joy in recounting the oft-told tale; and it may be to his early associations with the old story that his great affection for Morton's play, "The Children in the Wood," which he so often commended-particularly with Miss Kelly in the caste-was due. The actual legend of the children in the wood belongs, however, to Norfolk. William Plumer's newer and more fashionable mansion was at Gilston, which is not in the adjoining county, but also in Hertfordshire, near Harlow, only a few miles distant from Blakesware. Mrs. Field died of cancer in the breast in August, 1792, and was buried in Widford churchyard, hard by Blakesware. According to Lamb's Key the name Alice W- -n was "feigned." If by Alice W―n Lamb, as has been suggested, means Ann Simmons, of Blenheims, near Blakesware, he was romancing when he said that he had courted her for seven long years, although the same statement is made in the essay on "New Year's Eve" (see page 28). We know that in 1796 he abandoned all ideas of marriage. Writing to Coleridge in November of that year, in reference to his love sonnets, he says: "It is a passion of which I retain nothing. Thank God, the folly has left me for ever. Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me." This was 1796. Therefore, as he was born in 1775, he must have begun the wooing of Alice W- -n when he was fourteen in order to complete the seven long years of courtship. My own feeling, as I have stated in the notes to the love sonnets in Vol. V., is that Lamb was never a very serious wooer, and that Alice W. ――n was more an abstraction around which now and then to group tender imaginings of what might have been than any tangible figure. A proof that Ann Simmons and Alice W- -n are one has been found in the circumstance that Miss Simmons did marry a Mr. Bartrum, or Bartram, mentioned by Lamb in this essay as being the father of Alice's real children. Bartrum was a pawnbroker in Princes Street, Coventry Street. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that Hazlitt had seen Lamb wandering up and down before the shop trying to get a glimpse of his old friend. The August, 1822, number of the Lordon Magazine contained the following unsigned sonnet, inspired by "Dream-Children" : TO ELIA Elia, thy reveries and vision'd themes To Care's lorn heart a luscious pleasure prove; Soft as the anguish of remember'd love : Peopled with sweet and uncreated things;- Sing on, sweet Bard, let fairy loves again Smile in thy dreams, with angel ecstasies; Bright o'er our souls will break the heavenly strain "Dream-Children" has lately been made the theme of a very graceful and charming suite by Dr. Edward Elgar. Page 103, line 6 from foot. Tedious shores of Lethe. The passage in Lamb's mind was almost certainly, Canon Ainger remarks, that in the Eneid, VI., lines 748-751, where Anchises expounds to Æneas the doctrine of the Soul of the Universe. Speaking of those who have passed through their period of probation he says:— Has omnes, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos, (All these when they have travelled round the circle of a thousand years, God summons in mighty throngs to the river of Lethe, that so, forgetful of the past, they may go back to visit again the vault of the sky, and begin without reluctance to return to the body. Lonsdale and Lee's translation.) |