The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated
their natural community of interest had, one might think, something
to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous
writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the
way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very different from
that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But one cannot
forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as
originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb,
like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a
precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age.
But it might have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and
feeling, on the strength of which they too are borne upward, would
sometimes overflow barriers. And so it happens that these simple
stories are touched, much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with
tragic power. Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the
minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very
delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely
preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been
apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and
inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth,
with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic
greatness, to the discipline of the heart.
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