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
respects deporting himself like a "gentleman who lives at home at ease;"
not like a poor clerk, obliged to husband his small means, and to deny
himself the cheap luxury of books that he had long coveted.
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