Chapter CCCXLI: 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.]