shelves of scattered folios," and remained there three weeks, visiting
Wordsworth's cottage, he himself being absent, and meeting the Clarksons
("good, hospitable people"). They tarried there one night, and met Lloyd.
They clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, "and went to Grassmere,
Ambleside, Ullswater, and over the middle of Helvellyn." Coleridge then
dwelt upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, quite "enveloped on all
sides by a net of mountains." On his return to London, Lamb wrote to his
late host, saying, "I feel I shall remember your mountains to the last day
of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been
falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the
lady." He soon subsided, however, into his old natural metropolitan
happiness.

Wordsworth was not in the Lake country when Lamb visited Coleridge; but
after his return the great poet visited Charles in London, passed some
time there, and then departed for Yorkshire, where he went in order to be
married.

At this time Lamb contributed (generally facetiae) to various newspapers,
now forgotten. One of them, it was said jocosely, had "two and twenty
readers, including the printer, the pressman, and the devil." But he was
still very poor; so poor that Coleridge offered to supply him with prose
translations from the German, in order that he might versify them for the
"Morning Post," and thus obtain a little money. In one of his letters Lamb
says, "If I got or could but get fifty pounds a year only, in addition to
what I have, I should live in affluence."

About the time that he is writing this, he is recommending Chapman's
"Homer" to Coleridge; is refusing to admit Coleridge's _bona fide_ debt to
himself of fifteen pounds; is composing Latin letters; and in other