Unlike Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, his colleagues in the "Lake School" of poetry, William Wordsworth was from childhood intimately associated with the picturesque and mountainous region of northwestern England that contains the country's principal lakes, including Windermere, Grasmere, Derwentwater, and Ullswater. In fact, this lifelong connection led James Russell Lowell to dub Cumberland, Westmoreland, and part of Lancashire "Wordsworthshire."

Wordsworth (1770-1850), born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, lived, studied, and roamed in the area until 1787, when he entered St. John's College, Cambridge. However, he disliked the curriculum, the methods of examination, and the compulsory attendance at chapel, preferring in their stead independent study and ramblings near the town. Once, while in his native district on holiday, he attended a dance that lasted into the early morning. As he walked home he was captivated by the beauty of the dawn and the sights and sounds of the countryside. He felt that nature was reproaching him for the time he had wasted on empty pursuits, and, as he recorded in (333-38), he sensed that somehow he had been assured that he should be, " else sinning greatly, / A dedicated Spirit." Thereafter, he consecrated his life to poetry.

In the summer of 1790 Wordsworth and his closest college friend, the Welshman Robert Jones, made a walking tour through France and the Alps, described in (Thomas De Quincey estimated that by the age of thirty-five Wordsworth had walked between 175,000 and 180,000 miles.) The mountain scenery greatly impressed him, but he was especially struck by the celebrations marking the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. He graduated from Cambridge in 1791 with no prospects for supporting himself. After a walking tour with Jones of North Wales (the occasion of the ascent of Mount Snowden in ), he returned to France late in the year to prepare himself for the occupation of travelling tutor. He spent more than a year there, mostly at Orleans and Blois. Hitherto little interested in politics, Wordsworth, caught up in the intense revolutionary excitement, attached himself to the Girondist party, educated in its doctrines by the group's local leader, Captain Michel Beaupuy. Wordsworth came to view the ancien regime as a system of terror and corruption, and as a "democrat," he championed the radical actions that he thought would inaugurate an era of truth, freedom, and reform.

In Orleans, amatory as well as republican affairs occupied his time. A passionate liaison with his French tutor, Annette Vallon, resulted in the birth of a daughter in December 1792. He acknowledged the child's paternity and had her baptized Anne Caroline Wordsworth. Deeply in love, William and Annette intended to marry, but financial difficulties forced him to leave the country at the end of 1792. Great Britain's declaration of war against France the next year thwarted his return. Nevertheless, he continued to provide Annette and her daughter with whatever his modest means would permit.

In 1793 he published his first serious poetical works, , both written in rhymed couplets. The English war effort and the French Reign of Terror soured his republican sympathies. "Sick, wearied out with contrarieties," he yielded up moral questions in despair" (, 304-5). As feeling had betrayed him in both his political and personal lives, he briefly adopted the ultra-rationalistic philosophy of William Godwin, as expressed in his (1793), and the anti-sentimental psychology of David Hartley.

His fortunes brightened in 1795 when a legacy of nine hundred pounds enabled him to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy (1771-1855), who then began her long career as his confidante, inspiration, and secretary. There he continued to write poetry and to recover his emotional equilibrium, Dorothy's delight in nature reawakening his own. The rise of Napoleon and France's invasion of Switzerland cooled his faith in the Revolution, and as he grew older he became increasingly conservative in political matters.

Wordsworth's early poems won the admiration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in 1795 the men met in Bristol. To continue the association, Wordsworth and his sister moved two years later to Alfoxden House, Somerset, in the neighborhood of Nether Stowey, where Coleridge then lived. Their intimate, daily companionship in the marvelous year of 1797-1798 resulted in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Coleridge's , and the other poems that comprised the , published anonymously in 1798 (item 2).

Public appreciation of early ballads had been growing since the appearance in 1765 of Bishop Thomas Percy's . The title of Wordsworth and Coleridge's collection stressed both the narrative quality of much of their work, characteristic of the true ballad, and the expression of feeling, typical of the lyric. They agreed that they would each approach poetry from a different angle. Wordsworth would take humble themes and make them seem magical, while Coleridge would render supernatural subjects real. According to the advertisement to the first edition of the , the poets sought "to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." Of the twenty-three poems in the volume, Coleridge contributed four, Wordsworth the rest, including "To My Sister," "We Are Seven," "Lines Written in Early Spring," and "The Idiot Boy," always one of Wordsworth's favorites.

The book received mixed notices, professional critics reacting coolly, poets and writers proclaiming its greatness. The essayist William Hazlitt recalled that when he heard Coleridge read aloud from the , he was overwhelmed by "the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry," with something of the effect "that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring." The edition sold out in two years.

To the second printing (2 vols., 1800) Wordsworth appended a Preface in which he expounded his poetical principles. Despite his protestation that he "never cared a straw about the theory," he devoted considerable thought to the Preface, revising it in 1802 and 1805. The work attacked the artificiality of neoclassical literature, with its "poetic diction" of elevated vocabulary and inflated rhetoric. In its stead Wordsworth advocated "a selection of language really used by men." In practice he did not reproduce exactly the dialects and linguistic imperfections of his humble characters, but in his poetry he did employ words and phrasing that approached standard English. He also exalted "humble and rustic life" as the proper subject matter for verse. Such people and settings, heretofore relegated to low comedy, possessed for Wordsworth an intimate contact with beneficent nature.

Wordsworth defined good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow .of powerful feelings." However, he expected the poet to reflect at length on his material, so that the strong emotion he recorded in his verse was that "recollected in tranquility." The object of poetry was "truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative," truth 11 carried alive into the heart by passion." Although urging the use of the language of prose in poetry, Wordsworth determined to retain meter. Its regularity tended to temper and restrain the passion and could transform a distaste for excited expression into a feeling of pleasure.

The Preface arose from Wordsworth's conversations with Coleridge, but Coleridge was never totally satisfied with his friend's remarks on diction, and in the (1817), he discussed and criticized them in detail.

While on a tour of Germany with Dorothy and Coleridge in 1798-1799, Wordsworth began his autobiographical poem in blank verse, ; or, . He completed it in 1805, but continued to revise the unpublished work during the remainder of his life. He addressed the entire poem to Coleridge, who was living in Malta for his health during most of the time was composed. Wordsworth read him the piece over a period of about two weeks, ending on 7 January 1807. That same evening, to mark the occasion and to record his impressions, Coleridge wrote the poem "To William Wordsworth," beginning "Friend of the wise! and Teacher of the Good!" Wordsworth determined never to publish the work in his lifetime. His nephew Christopher Wordsworth brought it out soon after his death in 1850; his widow provided the title (item 4).

does not represent a literal autobiography, for Wordsworth omitted, transposed, and telescoped much that happened to him. As its subtitle suggests, the poem especially explores the psychology of the poet, determining what forces encouraged and molded his poetic utterance. Wordsworth successively recalls his childhood, school days, first impressions of London, his initial visit to France and the Alps, his residence in France during the Revolution (but not his relationship with Annette Vallon), the impairment of his imagination and its restoration, under Dorothy's care, through intercourse with nature, and his reactions to these varied experiences. He details the development of his love for mankind and for "the unassuming things that hold / A silent station in this beauteous world."

In 1799 Wordsworth and his sister settled at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, in the Lake District. Coleridge soon moved nearby, into Greta Hall, Keswick, and fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, who became Wordsworth's sister-in-law in 1802 with his marriage to Mary Hutchinson, a Lake Country girl he had known since childhood. The Southeys came to reside in Greta Hall the following year.

Wordsworth had written much of his best poetry by 1807 when he published , including "Resolution and Independence," "My Heart Leaps Up," and a collection of sonnets that established him as the first great sonneteer since Milton. In his ambitious pseudo-Pindaric ode "Intimations of Immortality," he muses that although his eye beholds the beauty in nature, his heart can no longer feel the rapture such scenes formerly brought it. He also reflects that one's birth into this world represents but the soul's passage from Heaven to temporary residence in the flesh: ". . . trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home." As a person gets older, he loses much of this heavenly glory, and as the "vision splendid" gradually fades, he finds himself in the drab, everyday world. But his mature imagination recognizes the truth of immortality, which allows him to accept the transience of "splendour in the grass," sustained as he is by the "faith that looks through death."

For a number of years Wordsworth sought a government post, and in 1813 he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, which brought him f400 to f600 a year. At that time he and his family moved to Rydal Mount, his permanent home until his death. The repetition of Wordsworth's confidential remarks about Coleridge's drug use estranged the friends for a number of years, but even after their reconciliation, they could not reestablish their former intimacy and creative stimulation. After 1815, the year he published and the first collected edition of his poetry, his creative powers declined noticeably. As he himself observed in ,

The days gone by Return upon me

almost from the dawn Of life: the hiding-places of

man's power Open; I would approach them, but

they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes

on, May scarcely see at all.

Coleridge's discussion in the did much to publicize Wordsworth's genius. By the 1830s he had become a literary institution. Visitors and tourists, Keats among them, thronged to his home on what Charles Lamb termed "gaping missions." There were sometimes thirty pilgrims in a day, and Wordsworth, always parsimonious, might charge them for tea.

The significant verse of his later years is largely in sonnet form. In the thirty-four poems comprising sequence (1820), he follows the Lake Country river from its rise at Wrynose Fell to its mouth at the Irish Sea. (1822), numbering one hundred thirty-two in the final edition, traces the history of the Church of England. He published his last volume, , in 1842. He also resigned his position in the stamp office and received a civil-list pension. Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843, Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate, a position he accepted on the condition that he not be expected to produce "official" verse unless an occasion of national importance sincerely moved him. Honors could offset only partially the sadness that clouded his final years. He had to cope with the physical and mental decline of his sister Dorothy and with the death in 1847 of his beloved daughter Dora.

Younger poets like Robert Browning in "The Lost Leader" (written in 1843) might attack him for his shift from ardent radical to political conservative, but for the general public, the elderly Wordsworth became a venerable and respected figure in English letters. His death on 23 April 1850 appropriately coincided with the anniversary of the demise of his namesake William Shakespeare. At his request he was buried at Grasmere, beneath a headstone of characteristic simplicity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Wordswort's judgment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was "the most wonderful man" he ever met. Endowed with one of the most brilliant and complex minds of his day, he would, like Chaucer's parson, "gladly ... learn, and gladly teach." If he squandered a wealth of thought in correspondence and conversation, and left unfinished or merely projected major poems, lectures, and systematic expositions of his philosophical tenets, his critical theories, and his theology, he nevertheless produced a vast and impressive array of poetry, prose, and criticism. Few men have accomplished more. As a poet, he influenced Scott in the choice of meter for , and he repeatedly affected Keats and Shelley. As a critic, especially of Shakespeare, he laid the foundation for the interpretations of Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey. In social and political thought he inspired the young Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.

While a student at Christ's Hospital, London (1782-1791), he established a lifelong friendship with Charles Lamb, who described Coleridge as "alone among six hundred playmates," but even then, a "Logician, Metaphysician, Bard," unfolding in his "deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus," and 11 reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar." Here, too, he became an ardent admirer of the sonnets that the Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850) published in 1789, and he responded with his own feeble attempts in the form. In 1796 he printed a more polished sonnet dedicated to Bowles. As he records in the first chapter of the , he also made "within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions" of Bowles's verses which he presented to friends. Coleridge believed that "of the then living poets, Bowles and Cowper were . . . the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head." His own poetry would follow a similar course.

At Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1791, Coleridge showed amazing promise. So seriously and successfully did he pursue his studies that he won a scholars ii and the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek ode on the slave trade. But debts, carousing, unrequited love, and the excitement of politics undermined his earlier diligence, and using the fantastic alias Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke he enlisted in the cavalry. Rescued by his brothers, he returned to Cambridge but left in 1794 without a degree.

In June of that year he visited Oxford, where he met Robert Southey. The two young poets immediately became friends. Both burned with the contemporary spirit of , and conceived the idea of a utopian community, Pantisocracy, which they planned to establish on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Financial problems and Southey's withdrawal from the project helped doom the venture. Nevertheless, Coleridge and Southey collaborated on a play, , and on their marriages. Prodded by Southey (whom he never quite forgave), Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey's betrothed, Edith. Coleridge entered into the union "resolved, but wretched." Sarah, prim and intellectually limited, could not understand her husband. The relationship had no more hope of success than Pantisocracy.

In 1796 Coleridge published (item 18). "The Eolian Harp" ("Effusion XXXV") represents the best example in the collection of the "conversation poem," the personal, descriptive, meditative verse form that he originated and perfected. In "Religious Musings" he voices his support for the French Revolution and for his cherished dream of Pantisocracy. The volume also included four of Charles Lamb's sonnets that Coleridge had extensively revised. Lamb, however, received no credit on the title page for his efforts.

The second edition of Coleridge's (1797) omitted almost a third of the previously printed works and substituted about an equal number of new verses (item 19). In "Ode to the Departing Year," an attempt in the Pindaric mode, he predicts the downfall of England as the result of its opposition to the revolution in France. Lamb provided several additional pieces, which Coleridge did not alter, and saw his name on the title page. Charles Lloyd, whom Coleridge had taken on as a pupil in 1796, also contributed to the book. Lloyd's novel (1798) contains a satiric portrait of Coleridge in the form of its frantic hero. In 1798 he also collaborated with Lamb on . Lamb arranged the third edition of Coleridge's and saw it through the press in 1803 (item 20).

Coleridge met Wordsworth in 1795, but their association became close only in 1797 when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved near Nether Stowey, where Coleridge had a cottage. Coleridge revered his neighbor as "the best poet of the age." During the following eighteen months of their almost daily contact, Coleridge composed much of his finest poetry, culminating in his collaboration with Wordsworth on the . In this 11 annus mirabilis," the wonderful year of June 1797 to September 1798, he produced "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (addressed to Charles Lamb), , and the first part of . At the conclusion of (1805-1806), Wordsworth reminded him of this joyful, productive period:

Thou in delicious words, with happy heart,

Didst speak the vision of that Ancient Man,

The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes

Didst utter of the Lady Christabel.

But with no regular income, Coleridge reluctantly planned to become a Unitarian minister, until, in January 1798, Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the founder of the famous pottery firm, offered him a life annuity of f150, that he might use his obvious talents as he thought best.

In 1798 Joseph Cottle published the . Four of twenty-three poems belonged to Coleridge, including the opening work, . Wordsworth composed the remainder, among them, the closing piece, "Tintern Abbey." Although the professional reviewers were restrained, such writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey read the volume enthusiastically.

After a trip to Germany with the Wordsworths in 1799, Coleridge settled at Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake District, not far from Dove Cottage, Grasmere, where the Wordsworths had moved. The Southeys, too, came to live at Greta Hall in 1803. Misery and illness clouded Coleridge's life. Romantically, he felt for Sara Hutchinson a tremendous but hopeless passion that for some ten years dominated him, divorce from his wife being then legally impossible. The relationship inspired his partly autobiographical poem Love and informed the original version of . In 1802 Wordsworth wedded Sara's sister Mary.

Physically, Coleridge suffered from nausea, diarrhea, dyspepsia, and neuralgia. Wordsworth describes how, in a sudden spasm of agony, Coleridge would sometimes "throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground." For relief he turned to laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol), a standard, freely available remedy, which he had taken in college, and possibly earlier. Coleridge soon recognized that he had developed a dependence on the drug. A two-year sojourn on Malta from 1804 failed to restore him, and he returned to England more wretched and addicted than ever. He separated from his wife in 1807, although he continued to support her and their children, and thereafter lived primarily in London.

Despite such obstacles, Coleridge maintained an active association with literature. In 1808 he gave his first course of public lectures, on "Principles of Poetry." Over the next eleven years he mounted the platform to talk on Shakespeare, Milton, and other English poets; on classic and romantic drama; on political issues; on English poetry from the Middle Ages to the Restoration; and on the history of philosophy. He contributed articles to newspapers and attempted to write, publish, and distribute a periodical, (1809-1810). Despite a playing time of nearly five hours, his tragedy (a revision of his earlier play, ) ran for twenty nights at Drury Lane in 1813 (item 21). In 1815 he wrote the , his great, if uneven, treatise on the nature of poetry and the poet, with its extended criticism of Wordsworth's works (item 23).

For a time Coleridge lived with the Wordsworths at Grasmere and dictated his essays to Sara Hutchinson. Hearing that his host had spoken out against his habits, Coleridge cooled toward him. They were reconciled in 1812, but their "glad morning of friendship" could not be recaptured.

In 1816 Coleridge placed himself for the remainder of his life under the care of the physician James Gillman, who lived in the north London suburb of Highgate. The doctor managed to control, but not to eliminate, his patient's consumption of opium. Yet Coleridge recovered much of his former power, and for the next three years, enjoyed a sustained period of literary activity, from which date a number of newspaper articles; the publication in 1816 of a volume of poetry containing , , and (item 22); the appearance of the (1817); a play, (1817); a second book of i ems, (1817); a collection of revised essays from (1818),; treatises on religious and philosophical themes; and two courses of lectures (1818-1819), for which he wrote . In his last years he completed (1825), toured the Rhineland with Wordsworth (1828), and wrote (1830). He also labored on the magnum opus that would contain the definitive statement of many of his beliefs; he left it unfinished at his death.

Although generally bedridden for the last four years of his life, Coleridge remained intellectually alert, composing letters and outlining projects. He also retained much of his conversational prowess, and his rooms became a literary shrine to which old friends and visitors from England and abroad made pilgrimage until 1834, when death stilled "the Oracle of Highgate." A Midsummer Night's Dream

, which Mary Lamb (1764-1847) adapted for , contains descriptions of "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," but she and her brother Charles (1775-1834) could easily have given these human conditions "A local habitation and a name" by drawing on their own experiences. Lamb spent six weeks of 1795 voluntarily and "very agreeably" in a madhouse, his confinement in part the result of a disappointment in love. He wrote his close friend and former classmate at Christ's Hospital, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was." The hereditary mental instability in the Lamb family never again seriously threatened him, yet it affected the course of his life.

In September 1796, while temporarily deranged, Mary stabbed their invalid mother to death with a bread knife. Steadfastly refusing to commit his sister to a public madhouse, Lamb took her under his care, a responsibility he discharged with absolute love for four decades. Normally a woman of great charm and intelligence, Mary suffered from periodic seizures that required stays in private asylums.

In 1792, after six months as a clerk at South Sea House, London, Lamb began a thirty-three-year career as a clerk at East India House. A man of business rather than a professional writer, Lamb could devote only leisure time to literature, and he facetiously termed the hundred volumes of his clerical job his "true works."

Lamb's earliest publications were poems. In a letter of 1796 he reminded Coleridge of the "winter nights" of the previous year through which they had sat in a "little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat" in Newgate Street, "beguiling the cares of life with Poesy." Lamb credited Coleridge with kindling in him, "if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." Coleridge also generously included several of Lamb's early poems in his own published collections. In 1798 Lamb collaborated with Charles Lloyd on (item 37), issued the year Coleridge and William Wordsworth brought out . The volume, dedicated to Robert Southey, contained twenty pieces, thirteen by Lloyd and seven by Lamb, notably, his most famous poem, "The Old Familiar Faces."

Introductions to other poets only fired his own poetic zeal. He met Robert Southey, Coleridge's brother-in-law and the future laureate, in 1795. In 1797, while holidaying with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, he established a warm friendship with Wordsworth; during the visit Coleridge wrote "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," addressed to Lamb. Although he continued to pen poetry and verse until his death, he suffered from no delusions about his talents in this field, referring to such writing in 1822 as a "harmless occupation." In the May 1815 number of , Thomas Noon Talfourd, Lamb's friend and original biographer, mentioned him in the ambitious article, "An Attempt to Estimate the Poetical Talent of the Present Age, Including a Sketch of the History of Poetry, and Characters of Southey, Crabbe, Scott, Moore, Lord Byron, Campbell, Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth." Talfourd allotted but a single page to Lamb, praising him warmly but generally: "Of all living poets he possesses most the faculty of delighting ......"

Nature, that sine qua non for the Romantics, left Lamb cold. To Wordsworth's invitation to the Lake District he replied, "Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life." Of all places, Lamb most loved his native London, with its infinite variety of sights and sounds.

Lamb's patronage of the city's theatre, usually in the company of Mary, and his friendships within the profession, led him several times to try his hand at theatrical composition, with disappointing results. The blank-verse tragedy (item 39, written 1798-1799, printed 1802), for example, proved a slight first effort that John Kemble rejected for Drury Lane. The text, with its imitation of the Elizabethans within a Restoration setting, confirms Lamb's confession to the philosopher William Godwin that he was "the worst hand in the world at plot." Southey characterized the dialogue as "delightful poetry badly put together."

Lamb made a greater practical and literary contribution to the drama in 1808 with his editing of . To an anthology of scenes from plays by Webster, Heywood, Peele, Tourneur, and others, he added enthusiastic and sensitive annotations and comments. In union with Coleridge's lectures and Hazlitt's essays, Lamb's helped revive interest in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The previous year, 1807, Charles and Mary had published their classic . Designed for the Use of Young Persons (item 38). Commissioned by Godwin, then issuing a "Juvenile Library," the two-volume work rendered the plots of twenty plays into pleasant prose that unobtrusively taught the moral implications. Mary retold fourteen comedies, possibly with some fraternal assistance, and Charles summarized six tragedies, including Hamlet, with a title character "mad in craft," and a heroine who goes mad in fact. As the preface states, they prepared the adaptations especially for girls, "because boys are generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls," and thus have "the best scenes" memorized before their sisters may look into this "manly book." The enjoyed immediate success and went into several editions.

Lamb published nothing from 1814 to 1818, when an edition of his appeared. To Wordworth he wrote in 1818, "1 reckon myself a dab at Prose-verse I leave to my betters." Indeed, it was as an essayist and critic that he won lasting fame. In 1820, at the age of forty-five, he began contributing to a series of miscellaneous essays under the signature Elia. Lamb took his pseudonym from an Italian clerk employed thirty years earlier at South Sea House, where Lamb's brother John still worked. Bridget and James Elia represent Mary and John. The essays, which originally ran until 1823, constituted his most brilliant writing and truly established his reputation. Collected, they appeared as in 1823 (item 40).

Largely autobiographical, the twenty-eight Elia pieces treat of Lamb's own experiences, impressions, prejudices, and enthusiasms in a prose style felicitously combining humor and deep feeling, thoughtfulness and extravagance. The themes range widely: "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago," written in the third person, recalls with poignance and delight the school days of Lamb and Coleridge; in "Dream Children: A Reverie" he muses on the family he might have had by his first love, Ann Simmons, here named "Alice W."; Lamb appears at his merriest in "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig," a witty, fanciful account of the Chinese origin of roast pork as a food.

Their popularity occasioned a second series of twenty-five Elian essays, also largely published in , and issued in a single volume in 1833 as (item 41). "The Superannuated Man" contains Lamb's feelings upon retirement from the East India House; "The Wedding," a favorite of Wordsworth, contrasts the happiness of a wedding with the loneliness of the old bachelor who gives away the bride; the popular "Old China," with its excellent depiction of Mary, sets the great delight Elia and Bridget took in simple pleasures while living "just above poverty" against the meagre enjoyment they derive from small luxuries now permitted by relative affluence.

In 1823 Charles and Mary adopted Emma Isola, the orphaned daughter of a teacher of Italian. Her youthful presence brightened their lives, so frequently darkened in Charles's last years as Mary's attacks increased. During one such illness in 1831 he composed the comic ballad (item 43). Edward Moxon, Lamb's publisher, issued it anonymously-"By an Eye Witness"but, to the writer's chagrin, advertised it as "by the author of Elia." The book lost money. In 1833 Moxon married Emma Isola.

Moxon brought out Lamb's Album in 1830 (item 42). Lamb wrote drolly of the popularity of the album:

'Tis a Book kept by modern Young Ladies for show, Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know. A medley of scraps, half verse, and half prose, And some things not very like either, God knows.

Lamb's contribution to this hybrid form had just the right mix: genuine "album verses," "Miscellaneous" pieces, "Sonnets," "Commendatory Verses," "Acrostics," translations from the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, a "Pindaric Ode to the Tread Mill," a poem entitled "Going or Gone," and the play "A Wife's Trial."

On 27 December 1834 Charles Lamb died of an infection following a fall while out walking. Coleridge had preceded him in July at the age of sixty-two. Lamb eulogized his "fifty-years-old" friend as "the proof and touchstone" of all his "cogitations." In Wordsworth's opinion, Lamb's death "was doubtless hastened by his sorrow for that of Coleridge." Mary Lamb died on 20 May 1847 and was buried with her brother in Edmonton Churchyard, Greater London. Robert Southey

An intimate of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their neighbor at Keswick, Robert Southey (1774-1843) merits the title of "Lake Poet," but being also prolix and prolific, he remains forever saddled with the Byronic rhyming epithet of "mouthey"; never collected, his writings would fill upwards of one hundred volumes. His longer poems, though little read today, earned the admiration of contemporaries as diverse as Scott, Shelley, and Macaulay. His prose, which evidences an unexpected simplicity and frankness, impressed even Byron as "perfect."

Born in Bristol, Southey attended London's Westminster School, where he roomed with Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, a lifelong friend and a future Member of Parliament. To the school paper, , Southey contributed an article against flogging, arguing that corporal punishment, as the work of Satan, had no place in a Christian institution. For expressing such views he was promptly expelled.

While a student at Balliol College, Oxford, he became a champion of the French Revolution. His republican sympathies manifested themselves in , in which he cast his heroine as a defender of liberty. (Joseph Cottle published the piece, including part of Coleridge's "The Destiny of Nations," in 1796.) His college drama (printed in 1817 without his permission) commemorated the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

In June 1794 he met Coleridge, then on a visit to Oxford, and they became friends. Although Coleridge liked neither Oxford nor its inhabitants, he termed Southey "a Nightingale among Owls", whose "soaring is even unto heaven." They subsequently collaborated on the topical drama, (1794). Because both young men saw everywhere about them what Southey described as "the strong tyrannizing over the weak, man and beast," they evolved their scheme of "Pantisocracy"-a utopian community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna in America, where property would be shared equally. They trusted that in time man's innate goodness would assert itself and promote an era of virtue and happiness. But lack of money and internal disagreements helped doom the inchoate project. Meanwhile, the pair married the sisters Fricker, Edith becoming Mrs. Southey and Sara Mrs. Coleridge. At his brother-in-law's suggestion Southey settled in 1803 in the Lake Country, in Greta Hall on the outskirts of Keswick. An annual allowance for several years from Charles W.W. Wynn allowed Southey to pursue a career in letters with a measure of financial security. After 1807 a government pension replaced Wynn's beneficence. Southey earned the remainder of his income by ceaseless literary toil.

He met Wordsworth in the 1790s, but they and their families did not grow close until after the Southeys moved to Keswick. Southey recognized early Wordsworth's greatness as a poet; for his part, Wordsworth had reservations about his friend's poetry, preferring his prose. In 1819 he dedicated to Southey.

During Coleridge and Wordsworth's period, Southey also wrote ballads and short narrative poems distinguished by their directness and simple language. "The Battle of Blenheim" (1798), on Marlborough's victory over the French in 1704, sensitively portrays the futility of war; "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop" (1799), a gothic piece, recounts the legendary devouring by rats of the tenth-century German prelate Hatto; "The Old Man's Comforts" (1799) is perhaps better known through Lewis Carroll's parody, " 'You are old, Father William,' " in .

Southey then turned his pen to the composition of four long narrative poems (he disliked giving them "the degraded title of epics"), influenced by the Romantic penchant for the exotic and informed by his extensive reading of history and literature. (1801) draws on Arabian legend and Mohammedan mythology for its tale of the overthrow of a powerful band of devil worshippers by the young hero. (1805) recounts the adventures of a twelfth-century Welsh prince who reputedly discovered America and defeated a Florida tribe, the Aztecas, which then emigrated to Mexico. (1810), a Hindu story, illustrates the ultimate victory of righteousness over power, (1814) has as its theme the liberation of Spain by the penitent and self -sacrificing titular figure; the subject had earlier been treated by Scott in his poem (1811) and by Landor in the tragedy (1812). Upon these works Southey and many of his friends fully expected him to mount to a prominent place among English men of letters. Byron hit closer to the mark with his prediction that Southey's lengthy compositions would be read "when Homer and Vergil are forgotten-but not until then."

During this period Southey put behind him the radicalism of his youth, and in 1813, after Scott declined the position, he became Poet Laureate, succeeding Henry James Pye. At Southey's death Wordsworth received the bays. Of Southey's official poems as laureate, the best known is A (1821), on the apotheosis of King George 111, who died insane in 1820. The preface mounts a violent attack on "The Satanic School" of Byron, Shelley, and their imitators. Byron responded with a more famous parody, (1822), in which he held Southey up to ridicule.

Southey's real poetic talent lay in shorter pieces. "My Days among the Dead Are Past" (1818, 1823) evokes the peace and love he found amidst his library of fourteen thousand volumes. In "The Cataract of Lodore" (1820, 1823), one of the outstanding onomatopoetic verses in the language, he described for his children the sounds of the plunging waterfall not far from Keswick.

Prose increasingly occupied his energies. For several decades from 1808 he contributed regularly to the Tory . On such diverse topics as Catholic Emancipation, the Electoral Reform Bill, emigration, education, and the moral state of nations he expressed a conservative viewpoint. A representative summary of the policies he advocated in the journal appears in ; or, (1829) and in (1832).

He proved especially adept at biography. He expanded an article into the (1813) which, although dependent upon inferior sources and flawed in certain facts, stands as one of the classic biographies in English. Southey sensed his subject's greatness and power as a man and as a leader, and presented these qualities in a clear, forceful study. Because of the work's emphasis on patriotism, the United States government once published a special edition of Southey's for distribution to American officers and seamen. Although a member of the Church of England, Southey produced an eminently fair characterization of the leader of Methodism in his (1820). Coleridge, a fellow Anglican, praised it as "the favourite" of his library, the book he could read "for the twentieth time" when he could concentrate on nothing else. Southey's delightful of the poet William Cowper (1835) contains an important sketch of eighteenth-century literary history.

Editing and translating also figure in Southey's bibliography. His edition of Malory's , reprinting the text of Caxton's first edition, appeared in 1817. He prepared two anthologies of poetry, (1807), a collaboration with Grosvenor Bedford, and (1831). These he followed with editions of Bunyan (1830), Isaac Watt's (1834), and Cowper (1835-1837). Visits to Spain and Portugal sharpened his command of their languages and made him the ideal translator and editor of such works as (1803), (1807), and (1808).

His last long prose work, (7 vols., 1834-1847), ostensibly gives a history of the country physician Daniel Dove of Doncaster and his horse Nobs; in fact a miscellany, it collects scholarly curiosities, Rabelaisian jocosities, and the first known telling in print of the nursery tale "The Three Bears," based, Southey claimed, on a story told him by his eccentric uncle William Tyler. This latter piece, along with "The Cataract of Lodore," links Southey with other Romantics like Blake, Wordsworth, and Lamb, through a mutual interest in childhood.

A single-minded devotion to literature prompted him to refuse a number of non-literary positions and honors, notably, an unsought seat in Parliament to which he was elected in 1826, a professorship of history at Durham University in 1832, and a proffered baronetcy in 1835. In 1820 he did, however, accept a Doctorate of Laws from Oxford, his alma mater. He realized his prodigious output in part by working on various projects simultaneously, turning rapidly from one to another whenever his energy flagged. Southey was also a frequent and excellent letter writer. A number of editions of his voluminous correspondence, none of them complete, have appeared since 1849.

Tragedy marked his domestic life. Several of his children died young, and after three years of lunacy, his wife Edith succumbed in 1837. In 1839 he married Caroline Bowles, a cousin of the poet, the Rev. William Lisle Bowles, whose sonnets had early influenced Southey. A minor author in her own right, Miss Bowles corresponded with Southey for some twenty years. Excessive mental activity affected Southey, and he grew feeble in mind and body. Wordsworth recalls him in his beloved library, aimlessly lifting books from the shelves, "patting them with both hands affectionately like a child." In 1843, at the age of sixty-nine, Robert Southey died of softening of the brain and was buried in Crosthwaite Churchyard, Keswick.