The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 4: Poems and Plays
1798
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 4: Poems and Plays
1798
The Lambs' sibling collaboration produced some of the most intimate poetry of the Romantic era. This volume gathers their poems and plays from four decades (1794-1834), revealing both Charles and Mary's distinct voices in dialogue with mortality, nostalgia, and the tender cruelty of time's passage. The collection opens with a dedication to Coleridge, that other great Romantic friendship, before unfolding through early verses and later reflections. Here are epigrams and playful pieces alongside genuine elegies for the dead. Here too are the plays that showed the Lambs could do more than essays. Forty years of thinking about loss, about memory, about what remains when the people we love are gone. Mary Lamb's contributions, often overlooked, hold their own quiet power. This is not a monument to dead genius but a living thing: two minds thinking side by side about what it means to be mortal. For readers who want the Romantics not as statues but as people.
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“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.””
— Charles Lamb
“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.””
— Charles Lamb
“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have none for books, those spiritual repasts - a grace before Milton - a grace before Shakespeare - a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?””
— Charles Lamb
“Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras”
— Charles Lamb
“The inventor of [this saying, 'That Enough Is As Good As a Feast'] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not”
— Charles Lamb
“Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. … I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son”
— Charles Lamb
“I am sentimentally disposed to harmony but organically incapable of tune.””
— Charles Lamb
“I don't envy the mule his labyrinthine inlets, those indispensable side-intelligencers.””
— Charles Lamb
“On these little visual interpretations [Valentine's Day cards], no emblem is so common as the heart,”
— Charles Lamb
