Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834)
English essayist and poet, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb.
And half had staggered that stout Stagirite.
Presents, I often say, endear absents.
Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.
The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
Nay, rather,
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition 's shown;
And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.
For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.
For with G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak profanely) to be present with the Lord.
Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.
If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.
The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.