During these years Lamb's correspondence with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Walter Wilson, and Manning (principally with Manning) goes on. It is sometimes critical, sometimes jocose. He discusses the merits of various authors, and more than once expresses his extreme distaste for didactic writing. Now, he says, it is too directly instructive. Then he complains that the knowledge, insignificant and vapid as it is, must come in the _shape_ of knowledge. He could not obtain at Newberry's shop any of the old "classics of the Nursery," he says; whilst "Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about." His own domestic affairs struggle on as usual; at one time calm and pleasant, at another time troubled and uncomfortable, owing to the frequent recurrence of his sister's malady. In general he bore these changes with fortitude; I do not observe more than one occasion on which (being then himself ill) his firmness seemed altogether to give way. In 1798, indeed, he had said, "I consider her perpetually on the brink of madness." But in May, 1800, his old servant Hetty having died, and Mary (sooner than usual) falling ill again, Charles was obliged to remove her to an asylum; and was left in the house alone with Hetty's dead body. "My heart is quite sick" (he cries), "and I don't know where to look for relief. My head is very bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead." This was the one solitary cry of anguish that he uttered during his long years of anxiety and suffering. At all other times he bowed his head in silence, uncomplaining. Charles Lamb, with his sister, left Little Queen Street on or before 1800; in which year he seems to have migrated, first to Chapel Street, Pentonville; next to Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane; and finally to No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple, "a pistol shot off Baron Masere's;" and here he resided for about nine years. It was during his stay at Pentonville that he "fell in love" with a young Quaker, called Hester Savory. As (he confesses) "I have never spoken to her during my life," it may be safely concluded that the attachment was essentially Platonic. This was the young girl who inspired those verses, now so widely known and admired. I remember them as being the first lines which I ever saw of Charles Lamb's writing. I remember and admire them still, for their natural, unaffected style; no pretence, no straining for images and fancies flying too high above the subject, but dealing with thoughts that were near his affections, in a fit and natural manner. The conclusion of the poem, composed and sent after her death (in February, 1803) to Manning, who was then in Paris, is very sad and tender:-- My sprightly neighbor, gone before To that unknown and silent shore, Shall we not meet, as heretofore, Some summer morning?