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Thus ran the years away.

Mary Lamb, aged thirty-two, gentle, intelligent and wondrous kind, in sudden frenzy seized a knife from the table and with one thrust sank the blade into her mother’s heart. Charles Lamb, in an adjoining room, hearing the commotion, entered quickly and taking the knife from his sister’s hand, put his arm about her and tenderly led her away.

Returning in a few moments, the mother was dead.

Women often make a shrill outcry at sight of a mouse; men curse roundly when large, buzzing, blue-bottle flies disturb their after-dinner nap; but let occasion come and the stuff of which heroes are made is in us all. I think well of my kind.

Charles Lamb made no outcry, he shed no tears, he spoke no word of reproach. He met each detail of that terrible issue as coolly, calmly and surely as if he had been making entries in his journal. No man ever loved his mother more, but she was dead now–she was dead. He closed the staring eyes, composed the stiffening limbs, kept curious sightseers at bay, and all the time thought of what he could do to protect the living–she who had wrought this ruin.

Charles was twenty-one–a boy in feeling and temperament, a frolicsome, heedless boy. In an hour he had become a man.

It requires a subtler pen than mine to trace the psychology of this tragedy; but let me say this much, it had its birth in love, in unrequited love; and the outcome of it was an increase in love.

O God! how wonderful are Thy works! Thou makest the rotting log to nourish banks of violets, and from the stagnant pool at Thy word springs forth the lotus that covers all with fragrance and beauty!

* * * * *

Coleridge in his youth was brilliant–no one disputes that. He dazzled Charles and Mary Lamb from the very first. Even when a Blue-Coat he could turn a pretty quatrain, and when he went away to Cambridge and once in a long while wrote a letter down to “My Own C.L.,” it was a feast for the sister, too. Mary was different from other girls: she didn’t “have company,” she was too honest and serious and earnest for society–her ideals too high. Coleridge–handsome, witty, philosophic Coleridge–was her ideal. She loved him from afar.

How vain it is to ponder in our minds the what-might-have-been! Yet how can we help wondering what would have been the result had Coleridge wedded Mary Lamb! In many ways it seems it would have been an ideal mating, for Mary Lamb’s mental dowry made good Coleridge’s every deficiency, and his merits equalized all that she lacked. He was sprightly, headstrong, erratic, emotional; she was equally keen-witted, but a conservative in her cast of mind. That she was capable of a great and passionate love there is no doubt, and he might have been. Mary Lamb would have been his anchor to win’ard, but as it was he drifted straight on to the rocks. Her mental troubles came from a lack of responsibility–a rusting away of unused powers in a dull, monotonous round of commonplace. Had her heart found its home I can not conceive of her in any other light than as a splendid, earnest woman–sane, well-poised, and doing a work that only the strong can do. Coleridge has left on record the statement that she was the only woman he ever met who had a “logical mind”–that is to say, the only woman who ever understood him when he talked his best.

Coleridge made progress at the Blue-Coat School: he became “Deputy Grecian,” or head scholar. This secured him a scholarship at Cambridge, and thither he went in search of honors. But his revolutionary and Unitarian principles did not serve him in good stead, and he was placed under the ban.