years earlier, was published; and, in 1823, 'Poems.' These 'Poems,' which were introduced by a quotation from Byron Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The tree of knowledge is not that of life— included some interesting but abstruse stanzas 'On the difficulty with which, in youth, we bring home to our habitual consciousness the idea of death.' At the beginning of this piece Lloyd had placed a passage from Elia's essay on New Year's Eve' in a recent London Magazine.' On receiving a copy of the book, Lamb wrote ('Letters' ii. 79) with heroic kindness: 'Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg. They are sinuous, and to be won with wrestling. I do assure you in sincerity that nothing you have done has given me greater satisfaction. Your obscurity, where you are dark, which is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not the painful obscurity which no toil of the reader can dissipate; not the dead vacuum and floundering place in which imagination finds no footing: it is not the dimness of positive darkness, but of distance; and he that reads and not discerns must get a better pair of spectacles. I admire every piece in the collection. I cannot say the first is best: when I do so, the last read rises up in judgment. To your Mother, to your Sister, to Mary dead, they are all weighty with thought and tender with sentiment. Your poetry is like no other. Those cursed dryads and pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose, and I have made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that your present is rarely valued.' From the poem written on the death of Mary Lloyd, Charles Lloyd's mother, an extract has already been made (page 6). With the volume of 1823 Lloyd's literary career ended. The shadows then closed around him again and he moved with his family to France, where he died near Versailles, on January 16, 1839, a month before his sixtyfourth birthday. He thus outlived by a few years Coleridge and Lamb, who both passed away in 1834. Among the papers is a long account of Charles Lloyd's children written by Sophia ། CHARLES LLOYD IN LONDON 265 Lloyd, their mother, at some time probably in the first decade of the century. This chapter may well conclude with extracts from these loving notes: 'I expect few more delightful recollections than those connected with the infancy and childhood of my children, and to perpetuate these I have often thought I would make memoranda of those almost nameless circumstances, which nevertheless are of daily recurrence, and nearly as frequently the occasion of interesting remark, from children who have been encouraged but not taught to think. This resolution I at length begin to execute after having read with them the first Chapter of Genesis this morning. accurate in what is so recent, and must afterI can be tolerably wards endeavour to recall what has most impressed me on other occasions. At the 3rd verse, "God said, Let there be light, &c.," I remarked that whatever God thought proper to be done, would take place, if He gave only an order for it to be so. Gros. [Charles Grosvenor, born 1800] replied: "I should think that the light would not have come at His speaking if He had not made it beside."--At the 7th verse, "And God made the firmament |