you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her manners are simple, ardent, and impressive. In every motion her innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say 'guilt was a thing impossible with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in minute observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer."
An accident had lamed Coleridge the very morning after Lamb's arrival, so that he was unable to share his friends' walks. He turned his imprisonment to golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us, as in a still lake, the beauty of the Quantock hills and vales where they were roaming, the scenes amid which these great and happy days of youth and poetry and friendship were passed. It is the very poem in the margin of which, eight and thirty years afterwards, Coleridge on his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for Charles and Mary Lamb.
THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON.
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends whom I never more may meet again
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge
Wander in gladness and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds,
