Chapter CCCXL: Letter 606: Charles Lamb to J. Fuller Russell

[Summer, 1834.]

Sir,--I hope you will finish "Emily." The story I cannot at this stage anticipate. Some looseness of diction I have taken liberty to advert to. It wants a little more severity of style. There are too many prettinesses, but parts of the Poem are better than pretty, and I thank you for the perusal.

Your humble Servt.

C. LAMB.

Perhaps you will favour me with a call while you stay.

Line 42. "The old abbaye" (if abbey _was_ so spelt) I do not object to, because it does not seem your own language, but humoursomely adapted to the "how folks called it in those times."

82. "Flares"! Think of the vulgarism "flare up;" let it be "burns."

112. [In her pale countenance is blent
The majesty of high intent
With meekness by devotion lent,
And when she bends in prayer
Before the Virgin's awful shrine,--
The rapt enthusiast might deem
The seraph of his brightest dream,
Were meekly kneeling there.]

"Was" decidedly, not "were." The deeming or supposition, is of a reality, not a contingency. The enthusiast does not deem that a thing may be, but that it _is_.

118. [When first young Vernon's flight she knew,
The lady deemed the tale untrue.]

"Deemed"! This word is just repeated above; say "thought" or "held." "Deem" is half-cousin to "ween" and "wot."

143. [By pure intent and soul sincere
Sustained and nerved, I will not fear
Reproach, shame, scorn, the taunting jeer,
And worse than all, a father's sneer.]

A father's "sneer"? Would a high-born man in those days _sneer_ at a daughter's disgrace--would he _only_ sneer?

Reproach, and biting shame, and--worse
Than all--the estranged father's curse.

I only throw this hint out in a hurry.

177. "Stern and _sear_"? I see a meaning in it, but no word is good that startles one at first, and then you have to make it out: "drear," perhaps. Then why "to minstrel's glance"? "To fancy's eye," you would say, not "to fiddler's eye."

422. A knight thinks, he don't "trow."

424. "Mayhap" is vulgarish. Perchance.

464. "Sensation" is a philosophic prose word. Feeling.

27. [The hill, where ne'er rang woodman's stroke,
Was clothed with elm and spreading oak,
Through whose black boughs the moon's mild ray
As hardly strove to win a way,
As pity to a miser's heart.]

Natural illustrations come more naturally when by _them_ we expound mental operations than when we deduce from natural objects similes of the mind's workings. The miser's struggle thus compared is a beautiful image. But the storm and clouds do not inversely so readily suggest the miser.

160. [Havock and Wrath, his maniac bride,
Wheel o'er the conflict, &c.]

These personified gentry I think are not in taste. Besides, Fear has been pallid any time these 2,000 years. It is mixing the style of Aeschylus and the _Last Minstrel_.

175. Bracy is a good rough vocative. No better suggests itself, unless Grim, Baron Grimm, or Grimoald, which is Saxon, or Grimbald! Tracy would obviate your objection [that the name Bracy occurs in _Ivanhoe_] but Bracy is stronger.

231. [The frown of night
Conceals him, and bewrays their sight.]

Betrays. The other has an _unlucky association_.

243. [The glinting moon's half-shrouded ray.]

Why "glinting," Scotch, when "glancing" is English?

421. [Then solemnly the monk did say,
(The Abbot of Saint Mary's gray,)
The leman of a wanton youth
Perhaps may gain her father's _ruth_,
But _never_ on his injured breast
May lie, caressing and caressed.
Bethink you of the vow you made
When your light daughter, all distraught,
From yonder slaughter-plain was brought,
That if in some secluded cell
She might till death securely dwell,
The house of God should share her wealth.]

Holy abbots surely never so undisguisedly blurted out their secular aims.

I think there is so much of this kind of poetry, that it would not be _very taking_, but it is well worthy of pleasing a private circle. One blemish runs thro', the perpetual accompaniment of natural images. Seasons of the year, times of day, phases of the moon, phenomena of flowers, are quite as much your _dramatis personae_ as the warriors and the ladies. This last part is as good as what precedes.