Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Shelley even--sharing so largely in the unrest of their own age, and
made personally more interesting thereby, yet, of their actual work,
surrender more to the mere course of time than some of those who may
have seemed to exercise themselves hardly at all in great matters, to
have been little serious, or a little indifferent, regarding them.
Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the
details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no
part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract
theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of
boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he
is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing
littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful
heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect
understanding of it.
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