From “Conversations on the Poets.”

THE SWEET lovingness of Lamb’s nature fitted him for a good critic; but there were knotty quirks in the grain of his mind, which seemed, indeed, when polished by refined studies, little less than beauties, and which we cannot help loving, but which led him to the worship of strange gods, and with the more scrupulous punctuality that the mass were of another persuasion. No field is so small or so barren but there will be grazing enough in it to keep a hobby in excellent case. Lamb’s love was of too rambling and widespreading a kind to be limited by the narrow trellises which satisfy a common nature. It stretched out its feelers and twined them around everything within its reach, clipping with its tender and delicate green the fair tree and unsightly stump alike. Everything that he loved was, for the time, his ideal of loveliness. Even tobacco, when he was taking leave of it, became the very “crown of perfumes.” and he affirmed:—

  In this, and in the finer glimpses of his humor, and in the antique richness of his style in the best parts, he reminds me of Emerson; but he had not the divine eye of our American poet, nor his deep transparency and majestic simpleness of language, full of images that seem like remembrance-flowers dropped from between the pages of Bacon, or Montaigne, or Browne, or Herbert; reminding us of all felicitous seasons in our own lives, and yet infused with a congenial virtue from the magic leaves between which they had been stored.