in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother once lived, and the "old church
where the bones of my honored granddame lie." This visit was, in later
years, recorded in the charming paper entitled "Blakesmoor in H----shire."
He found that the house where he had spent his pleasant holidays, when a
little boy, had been demolished; it was, in fact, taken down for the
purpose of reconstruction; but out of the ruins he conjures up pleasant
ghosts, whom he restores and brings before a younger generation. There are
few of his papers in which the past years of his life are more
delightfully revived. The house had been "reduced to an antiquity." But we
go with him to the grass plat, were he used to read Cowley; to the
tapestried bedrooms, where the mythological people of Ovid used to stand
forth, half alive; even to "that haunted bedroom in which old Sarah Battle
died," and into which he "used to creep in a passion of fear." These
things are all touched with a delicate pen, mixed and incorporated with
tender reflections; for, "The solitude of childhood" (as he says) "is not
so much the mother of thought as the feeder of love." With him it was
both.

Lamb became acquainted with Wordsworth when he visited Coleridge, in the
summer of 1800. At that time his old schoolfellow lived at Stowey, and the
greater poet was his neighbor. It is not satisfactorily shown in what
manner the poetry of Wordsworth first attracted the notice of Charles
Lamb, nor its first effect upon him. Perhaps the verse of Coleridge was
not a bad stepping-stone to that elevation which enabled Charles to look
into the interior of Wordsworth's mind. The two poets were not unlike in
some respects, although Coleridge seldom (except perhaps in the "Ancient
Mariner") ventured into the plain, downright phraseology of the other. It
is very soon apparent, however, that Lamb was able to admit Wordsworth's
great merits. In August, 1800 (just after the completion of his visit to
Stowey), he writes, "I would pay five and forty thousand carriages"