Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years come upon us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) Life itself loses much of its Poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature; and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look another way. You yourself write no Christabels, nor Ancient Mariners, now. Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances, which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct--the memory "Of summer days and of delightful years--" even so far back as to those old suppers at our old ... Inn,--when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless,--and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness.-- "What words have I heard Spoke at the Mermaid!" The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the _same_ who stood before me three-and-twenty years ago--his hair a little confessing the hand of Time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain,--his heart not altered, scarcely where it "alteration finds." One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without rewriting it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John Woodvil, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists: Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a _first love_; and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge? The very time which I had chosen for my story, that which immediately followed the Restoration, seemed to require, in an English play, that the English should be of rather an older cast than that of the precise year in which it happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults, which I can less vindicate than the language. I remain, My dear Coleridge, Yours, With unabated esteem, C. LAMB. POEMS * * * * * HESTER. When maidens such as Hester die, Their place ye may not well supply, Though ye among a thousand try, With vain endeavor. A month or more hath she been dead, Yet cannot I by force be led To think upon the wormy bed, And her together. A springy motion in her gait, A rising step, did indicate Of pride and joy no common rate, That flush'd her spirit. I know not by what name beside I shall it call:--if 'twas not pride, It was a joy to that allied, She did inherit. Her parents held the Quaker rule, Which doth the human feeling cool, But she was train'd in Nature's school, Nature had blest her.