For Charles Lamb, such form of religion becomes the
solemn background on which the nearer and more exciting objects of his
immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing from it an expression
of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a profound quiet, that
quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy, working, we might
say, on the principle of the _opus operatum,_[88] almost without any
co-operation of one's own, towards the assertion of the higher self.
And, in truth, to men of Lamb's delicately attuned temperament mere
physical stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long for
it sometimes, as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical
sensuality.
The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value
of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour,
and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character
of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a
genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest in those
hard shadows of _Rosamund Grey_, is always there, though not always
realised either for himself or his readers, and restrained always in
utterance.
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