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　　LETTER 607

　　CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE

　　[No date. End of July, 1834.]

　　Dear Sir, I am totally incapable of doing what you suggest at present, and think it right to tell you so without delay. It would shock me, who am shocked enough already, to sit down to write about it. I have no letters of poor C. By and bye what scraps I have shall be yours. Pray excuse me. It is not for want of obliging you, I assure you. For your Box we most cordially feel thankful. I shall be your debtor in my poor way. I do assure you I am incapable.

　　Again, excuse me

　　Yours sincerely

　　C.L.

　　[Coleridge's death had occurred on July 25, in his sixty-second year; and Dilke had written to Lamb asking for some words on that event, for The Athenaeum. A little while later a request was made by John Forster that Lamb would write something for the album of a Mr. Keymer. It was then that Lamb wrote the few words that stand under the title "On the Death of Coleridge" (see Vol. I.). Forster wrote thus of the effect of Coleridge's death upon Lamb:—

　　He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, "cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed" upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder, or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words, "Coleridge is dead." Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it never left him.

　　Wordsworth said that Coleridge's death hastened Lamb's.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6