This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt, but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though _frost_ might bring them together temporarily, _heat and thunder_ must be powerless to make or to unmake the _marks_ that showed the cliffs to have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, _heat_ (supposing _frost_ to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely as a balancing phrase, and _thunder_ simply as the inevitable rhyme to _asunder_. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest discounting. Rossetti replied: Your geological strictures on Coleridge’s “friendship” passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I would fain think that this is “to consider too nicely.” I am certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb’s letter _is_ a teazer. The three sonnets in _The Monthly Magazine_ were signed “Nehemiah Higginbotham,” and were meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,--C. himself being, of course, the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit the mark as regards Coleridge’s epigram and Sir Vinegar Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all.... _I_ also remember noting Lloyd’s assertion of Lamb’s exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the raciness of the first, is very disappointing. * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.