During these lamentable days he saw his sister but seldom: “Alas! I too often hear her!... Her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world.” That is to me the most tender and touching utterance in all the letters since letters were invented.
At times, when her mind was not too turbid, she played piquet with him, and they talked of death; which they did not fear, nor yet wish for. Neither had been ever quite able to say with Sir Thomas Browne, in Lamb’s favourite “Religio Medici”: “I thank God I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world, as to dote on life, or be convulsed and tremble at the name of death.” Both wished that Mary should go first. Mrs. Cowden Clarke has told us how he said abruptly, one day--his blunt words covering his intense tenderness--“You must die first, Mary.” And she replied, with her little quiet nod and kindly smile: “Yes, I must die first, Charles!”
Death was much in their thoughts during these days. Hazlitt had died in 1830, Lamb being with him at the last; and in July, 1834, Coleridge ended, after long suffering, a life of “blighted utility,” as he himself truly put it. The passing away of this dearest of the old familiar faces profoundly affected Lamb. “His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him.” Nor did he linger long alone. One day, in the winter of that year, taking his customary walk, he stumbled, fell, and bruised his face. The wound did not seem serious, until erysipelas suddenly set in, and rapidly drained him of his insufficient vitality. So, on the 27th of December, 1834, the Festival of St. John and the Eve of the Innocents, sank to sleep forever, in the fine words of Archbishop Leighton, “this sweet diffusive bountiful soul, desiring only to do good.” He was happy in not living, as he had said long before, “after all the strength and beauty of existence is gone, when all the ‘life of life is fled,’ as poor Burns expresses it.”
It was a peaceful and painless ending, yet infinitely pitiful in its loneliness for one so essentially social in his life; his sister’s mind being too clouded to comprehend what was passing, and his only two friends who happened to be within reach--Talfourd and Crabb Robinson--arriving too late for his recognition. They heard him murmuring, with his faint voice, the names of his dear old companions. Only a few days before he had shown to a friend the mourning-ring left him by Coleridge, crying out, as he was wont to do, “Coleridge is dead.” And it had been but two weeks since, when, during a walk, he had pointed out to his sister the spot in the churchyard where he would like to lie.