may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you my
head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another
person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.

It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic
love for A---- W----; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about
this time, the "Alice W----" of the later "Dream Children," and other
of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love
that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This
year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked
almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and
friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn
that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his
brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so
bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be
probable.[1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being "sore
galled with disappointed hope," and felt something of enforced
loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he described himself, "slow
of speech and reserved of manners"; he went nowhere, as he put it,
had no acquaintance, and but one friend--Coleridge. It is difficult,
in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was but
just come of age in the previous February. The first twenty or so of
the letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to
Coleridge (1796-1798). Between the seventh of the series (5th July,
1796) and the eighth (27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at
the close of which happened the tragedy that coloured the whole of
Charles Lamb's subsequent life and caused him to give himself up to a
life of devotion to which it would not be easy to find a parallel.