"Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;
The rapt One of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth."

S. C. Footnote 1 ends: main text resumes:]

Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this
period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The
exquisite Essay intitled, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years
ago", by Lamb, is principally founded on that delightful writer's
recollections of the boy Coleridge, and that boy's own subsequent
descriptions of his school days. Coleridge is Lamb's "poor friendless
boy."--"My parents and those who should care for me, were far away.
Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being
kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they
had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired
of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I
thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and
I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of
separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I
used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams would
my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees,
and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart
exclaim upon sweet "Calne in Wiltshire!""