My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning, calm and serene; far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity. CHARLES LAMB: _Letter to Coleridge_, 1796, in ‘Final Memorials of Charles Lamb,’ by Thomas Noon Talfourd. London: Edward Moxon, 1848. * * * * * Little could any one, observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of her demeanor, guess the calamity in which she had partaken or the malady which frightfully checkered her life. From Mr. Lloyd ... I learned that she had described herself, on her recovery from the fatal attack, as having experienced, while it was subsiding, such a conviction that she was absolved in Heaven from all taint of the deed in which she had been the agent--such an assurance that it was a dispensation of Providence--such a sense that her mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision--that she was not sorely afflicted by the recollection. It was as if the old Greek notion of the necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else polluted though guiltless, to pass through a religious purification, had in her case been happily accomplished. THOMAS NOON TALFOURD: ‘Final Memorials of Charles Lamb.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Relapses.] Her relapses were not dependent on the seasons; they came in hot summers and with the freezing winters. The only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. Charles (poor fellow) had to live, day and night, in the society of a person who was--mad! If any exciting talk occurred, he had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If any stupor or extraordinary silence was observed, then he had to rouse her instantly. BRYAN W. PROCTER: ‘Charles Lamb; a Memoir.’ * * * * * The constant impendency of this giant sorrow saddened to the Lambs even their holidays; as the journey which they both regarded as the relief and charm of the year was frequently followed by a seizure.