[Eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge], born, at Clevedon, Somersetshire, 19 Sept. 1796. Educated at Ambleside School. Visit to London, 1807. Matric., New Inn Hall, Oxford, 6 May 1815; B.A., Merton Coll., 11 Feb. 1819. Fellow of Oriel Coll., 1819–20. Deprived of fellowship on ground of intemperance. In London, 1821–23. Returned to Ambleside to engage in tuition. Contrib. occasionally to “Blackwood’s Mag.,” 1826–31. Tuition abandoned, 1830. Lived in house of Mr. Bingley, a publisher, at Leeds, engaged in literary work, 1831–33. Took up residence at Grasmere. Assistant master at Sedbergh Grammar School for two short periods in 1837 and 1838. Returned to Grasmere. Died there, 6 Jan. 1849. Works: “Biographia Borealis,” 1833 (another edn. entitled “Lives of Northern Worthies,” edited by Derwent Coleridge, 1852; an extract, published separately as “Lives of Illustrious Worthies of Yorkshire,” 1835); “Poems,” 1833. Posthumous: “Essays and Marginalia” (ed. by Derwent Coleridge), 1851. He edited: Massinger and Ford’s Dramatic Works, 1840. Life: by Derwent Coleridge, in 1851 edn. of Hartley Coleridge’s “Poems.”

Personal

  When I first saw the child, I did not feel that thrill and overflowing of affection which I expected. I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely contemplative, and my heart only sad. But when two hours after, I saw it at the bosom of its mother, on her arm, and her eye tearful and watching its little features—then I was thrilled and melted, and gave it the kiss of a father…. The baby seems strong, and the old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness of me in its face, no great compliment to me; for in truth I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy.

  Hartley is from home, visiting Mr. Wordsworth’s sisters near Penrith. It is impossible to give you any adequate idea of his oddities; for he is the oddest of all God’s creatures, and becomes quainter and quainter every day. It is not easy to conceive what is perfectly true, that he is totally destitute of anything like modesty, yet without the slightest tinge of impudence in his nature. His religion makes one of the most humorous parts of his character. “I’m a boy of a very religious turn,” he says; for he always talks of himself, and examines his own character, just as if he was speaking of another person, and as impartially. Every night he makes an extempore prayer aloud; but it is always in bed, and not till he is comfortable there and got into the mood. When he is ready he touches Mrs. Wilson, who sleeps with him, and says “Now listen!” and off he sets like a preacher. If he has been behaving amiss, away he goes for the Bible, and looks out for something appropriate to his case in the Psalms or the Book of Job. The other day, after he had been in a violent passion, he chose out a chapter against wrath. “Ah! that suits me!”… I do not know whether I should wish to have such a child or not. There is not the slightest evil in his disposition, but it wants something to make it steadily good; physically and morally there is a defect of courage. He is afraid of receiving pain to such a degree that, if any person begins to read a newspaper, he will leave the room, lest there should be anything shocking in it. This is the explication of his conduct during Mrs. Wilson’s illness. He would not see her because it would give him pain, and when he was out of sight he contrived to forget her. I fear that, if he lives, he will dream away life like his father, too much delighted with his own ideas ever to embody them, or suffer them, if he can help it, to be disturbed.

  Hartley Coleridge is one of the strangest boys I ever saw. He has the features of a foreign Jew, with starch and affected manners. He is a boy pedant, exceedingly formal, and, I should suppose, clever.

  Accounts reached us of the “humble and prayerful” death of Hartley Coleridge. His brother Derwent has been with him three weeks, and had the unspeakable blessing of directing and supporting that weak but humble and loving spirit through its last conflicts with the powers of the world. Much forever gone with this radiant soul, but more radiance and peace clothe the memories he leaves us than those who knew him dared to hope.

  He lived in a small cottage on the banks of the lake of Grasmere, about a mile from the residence of Wordsworth, in the midst of a region of singular beauty and grandeur, “meet nurse for a poetic child.” His life was that of a recluse, mostly divided between solitary walks and solitary studies. He seemed to have no personal relations with the families of the gentlemen resident in the neighborhood, and he rarely crossed the path of the tourists who at certain seasons of the year swarmed like autumnal leaves in that lovely region. This arose from no inherent unsocialness of nature, but more than anything else, from the consciousness of his unfortunate habits, and the sting of self-reproach which they left behind…. His head was large and expressive, with dark eyes and white waving locks, and resting upon broad shoulders, with the smallest possible apology for a neck. To a sturdy and ample frame were appended legs and arms of a most disproportioned shortness, and “in his whole aspect, there was something indescribably elfish and grotesque, such as limners do not love to paint, nor ladies to look upon.” He reminded you of a spy-glass shut up, and you wanted to take hold of him and pull him out into a man of goodly proportions and average stature. It was difficult to repress a smile at his appearance as he approached, for the elements are so quaintly combined in him that he seemed like one of Cowley’s conceits translated into flesh and blood…. His manners were like those of men accustomed to live much alone, simple, frank and direct, but not in all respects governed by the rules of conventional politeless. It was difficult for him to sit still. He was constantly leaving his chair, walking about the room and then sitting down again, as if he were haunted by an incurable restlessness. His conversation was very interesting, and marked by a vein of quiet humor, not found in his writings. He spoke with much deliberation and in regularly constructed periods, which might have been printed without any alteration. There was a peculiarity in his voice not easily described. He would begin a sentence in a sort of subdued tone, hardly above a whisper, and end it in something between a bark and a growl.

  My acquaintance with Hartley Coleridge commenced at Oxford, soon after his first examination in the schools, and it continued till the time when he stood for the Oriel fellowship. I then quitted the University, and we never met again. If I had known Hartley later in his career, perhaps something painful might have mingled with my recollections of him; but I remember him only as a young man who possessed an intellect of the highest order, with great simplicity of character, and considerable oddity of manner. His extraordinary powers as a converser (or rather a declaimer) procured for him numerous invitations to what are called at Oxford “wine parties.” He knew that he was expected to talk, and talking was his delight. Leaning his head on one shoulder, turning up his dark bright eyes, and swinging backwards and forwards in his chair, he would hold forth by the hour (for no one wished to interrupt him) on whatever subject might have been started—either of literature, politics, or religion—with a originality of thought, a force of illustration, and a facility and beauty of expression, which I question if any man then living, except his father, could have surpassed.

  He was a most extraordinary child, exhibiting at six years old the most surprising talent for invention. At eight years of age he found a spot upon the globe which he peopled with an imaginary nation, gave them a name, a language, laws, and a senate; where he framed long speeches, which he translated, as he said, for my benefit, and for the benefit of my neighbours, who climbed the garden-wall to listen to this surprising child, whom they supposed to be reciting pieces from memory. About this time he wrote a tragedy; and being at a loss in winding up the catastrophe, applied to his father, who excited his indignation by treating the matter too lightly, when he said “he should inform the public that the only bad lines in the tragedy were written by Mr. Coleridge, Senior.” He called his nation the “Ejuxrii;” and one day, when walking very pensively, I asked him what ailed him. He said “My people are too fond of war, and I have just made an eloquent speech in the Senate, which has not made any impression on them, and to war they will go.”

  It was, I think, in the summer of the year 1818, that I first saw your brother Hartley, during a visit that I was paying to Mr. Southey at Greta Hall. I cannot easily convey to you the impression of interest which he made on my mind at that time. There was something so wonderfully original in his method of expressing himself, that on me, then a young man, and only cognizant externally of the prose of life, his sayings, all stamped with the impress of poetry, produced an effect analogous to that which the mountains of Cumberland, and the scenery of the North, were working on my southern-born eye and imagination.

  Among his friends we must count men, women, and children, of every rank and of every age. While he preserved the tone of his manners (which, though somewhat eccentric, were free from any tincture of vulgarity), and seldom, if ever, failed of being treated with due respect and consideration, he willingly overstepped the conventional distinctions by which society is divided. In the farmhouse or cottage, not alone at times of rustic festivity, at a sheep-sheering, a wedding, or a christening, but by the ingle side with the grandmother or the “bairns,” he was made, and felt himself, at home…. His manners and appearance were peculiar. Though not dwarfish either in form or expression, his stature was remarkably low, scarcely exceeding five feet, and he early acquired the gait and general appearance of advanced age. His once dark, lustrous hair, was prematurely silvered, and became latterly quite white. His eyes, dark, soft, and brilliant, were remarkably responsive to the movements of his mind, flashing with a light from within. His complexion, originally clear and sanguine, looked weather-beaten, and the contour of his face was rendered less pleasing by the breadth of his nose. His head was very small, the ear delicately formed, and the forehead, which receded slightly, very wide and expansive. His hands and feet were also small and delicate. His countenance, when in repose, or rather in stillness, was stern and thoughtful in the extreme, indicating deep and passionate meditation, so much so as to be at times almost startling. His low bow on entering a room, in which there were ladies or strangers, gave a formality to his address, which wore at first the appearance of constraint; but when he began to talk, these impressions were presently changed,—he threw off the seeming weight of years, his countenance became genial, and his manner free and gracious.

  The gentle, humble-hearted, highly gifted man, “Dear Hartley,” as my father called him, dreamed through a life of error, loving the good and hating the evil, yet unable to resist it. His companionship was always delightful to the Professor, and many hours of converse they held; his best and happiest moments were those spent at Elleray. My father had a great power over him, and exerted it with kind but firm determination. On one occasion he was kept imprisoned for some weeks under his surveillance, in order that he might finish some literary work he had promised to have ready by a certain time. He completed his task, and when the day of release came, it was not intended that he should leave Elleray. But Hartley’s evil demon was at hand; without one word of adieu to the friends in whose presence he stood, off he ran at full speed down the avenue, lost to sight amid the trees, seen again in the open highway still running, until the sound of his far-off footsteps gradually died away in the distance, and he himself was hidden, not in the groves of the valley but in some obscure den, where, drinking among low companions, his mind was soon brought to a level with theirs. Then these clouds would after a time pass away, and he again returned to the society of those who could appreciate him, and who never ceased to love him. Every one loved Hartley Coleridge; there was something in his appearance that evoked kindliness. Extremely boyish in aspect, his juvenile air was aided not a little by his general mode of dress, a dark blue cloth round jacket, white trousers, black silk handkerchief tied loosely round his throat; sometimes a straw hat covered his head, but more frequently it was bare, showing his black, thick, short, curling hair. His eyes were large, dark, and expressive, and a countenance almost sad in expression, was relieved by the beautiful smile which lighted it up from time to time. The tone of his voice was musically soft. He excelled in reading, and very often read aloud to my mother.

  But for the evil habit that preyed upon him he had been a great man. One of his friends has spoken of him as sometimes like the lofty column which the simoon raises in its mighty breath; the inspiration of great passion ceasing, there remained only the desert sand over which the serpent crawls. Poor Hartley waged unceasing war with his serpent, but never quite conquered it.

  Who is not subdued into thoughtful pity by the legend, “By Thy Cross and Passion,” that tells us of the struggle that poor Hartley Coleridge made, as he went from darkness into light? Yes, long as men with poetic susceptibilities to all evil, as well as all good, press on their way of tears to Him who wore the crown of thorns, that tombstone with its double garland of oak-leaf and of thorn, and its touching inscription, may do for their souls as much as all the verse he wrote, whose sonnet “On Prayer” is one of the sweetest in our language,—Hartley, the laureate for innocent childhood hereabout, who found “pain was his guest” long before he entered the painlessness of Grasmere churchyard mould.

  While my father was in the Lake Country he fell in with Hartley Coleridge, who discussed Pindar with him, calling Pindar “The Newmarket Poet.” “Hartley was wonderfully eloquent,” my father said, “and I suspect resembled his father in that respect. I liked Hartley, ‘Massa’ Hartley. I remember that on one occasion Hartley was asked to dine with the family of a stiff Presbyterian clergyman, residing in the Lake district. The party sat a long time in the drawing-room waiting for dinner. Nobody talked. At last Hartley could stand it no longer, he jumped up from the sofa, kissed the clergyman’s daughter, and bolted out of the house. He was very eccentric, a sun-faced little man. He once went on a walking tour with some friends. They suddenly missed him, and could not find him anywhere, and did not see him again for six weeks, when he emerged from some inn. He was a loveable little fellow.”

  It was a strange thing to see Hartley Coleridge fluctuating about the room, now with one hand on his head, now with both hands expanded like a swimmer’s. There was some element wanting in his being. He could do everything but keep his footing, and doubtless in his inner world of thought, it was easier for him to fly than to walk, and to walk than to stand. There seemed to be no gravitating principle in him. One might have thought he needed stones in his pockets to prevent his being blown away.

Sonnets

  The whole series of sonnets with which the earliest and best work of Hartley began is (with a casual episode on others) mainly and essentially a series on himself. Perhaps there is something in the structure of the sonnet rather adapted to this species of composition. It is too short for narrative, too artificial for the intense passions, too complex for the simple, too elaborate for the domestic; but in an impatient world where there is not a premium on self-describing, who so would speak of himself must be wise and brief, artful and composed—and in these respects he will be aided by the concise dignity of the tranquil sonnet.

  His Sonnets are very remarkable. They are the most imaginative part of his writings, as well as the most highly finished; and possess that indescribable union of sweetness and subtle pathos for which the sonnets of Shakespeare are so remarkable.

  Poor Hartley Coleridge, who promised so much and performed so little, produced many sonnets, and is, as a sonnet-writer, as far in front of his father as he is behind his father’s friend.

  There is a grace, a sweetness, a sense of shy, secluded beauty in his sonnets, which separate him from the poets of his time as surely as the odes of Collins separate him from the versifiers of his time, and which have given him an enduring though not a lofty place among the sonneteers of England.

  Hartley Coleridge now ranks among the foremost sonneteers in our language: as in the case of Charles Tennyson Turner, his reputation rests solely on his sonnet-work. Notwithstanding the reverent admiration he had for his more famous father, Hartley’s work betrays much more the influence of Wordsworth than of S. T. Coleridge. In this a wise instinct indubitably guided him. His father was not a sonneteer. There is a firmness of handling, a quiet autumnal tenderness and loveliness about Hartley’s sonnets that endows them with an endless charm for all who care for poetic beauty.

General

  With strong feeling, a bright fancy, and a facility of versification, there is yet a certain hard resemblance in the poems of the father, which may perhaps be termed an unconscious mechanism of the faculties, acting under the associations of love. His designs want invention, and his rhapsodies abandonment. His wildness does not look quite spontaneous, but as if it blindly followed something erratic. The mirth seems rather forced; but the love and the melancholy are his own. Hartley Coleridge has a sterling vein of thought in him, without a habit and order of thought. It is extremely probable that he keeps his best things to himself. His father talked his best thoughts, so that somebody had the benefit of them; his son for the most part keeps his for his own bosom.

  The influence of Wordsworth’s peculiar genius is more discernible in the productions of Hartley Coleridge than that of his father, more especially in the Sonnets, which, I venture to think, may sustain a comparison with those of the elder writer. Their port is indeed less majestic, they have less dignity of purpose, and, particularly in combination, are less weighty in effect; but taken as single compositions, they are not less graceful, or less fraught with meaning; they possess a softer if not a deeper pathos, they have at least as easy a flow and as perfect an arrangement. A tender and imaginative fancy plays about the thought, and as it were lures it forward, raising an expectation which is fully satisfied. Indeed, if I am not wholly mistaken, there will be found among these sonnets, models of composition comparable to those of the greatest masters.

  Beautiful and touching as these poems are, we are by no means sure that the editor is right in supposing that it is as a poet that his brother will be best remembered. He was a clear, earnest, and original thinker; and he delivered his thoughts in a manner so perspicuous and lively, with the peculiar humour of his own character so shining through, that his essays, which would be worth studying for the sense they contain, though the style were dull, are among the pleasantest things to read in the language. When all are gathered together they will fill, we suppose, several moderate-sized volumes. If so, and if we are not greatly mistaken as to the quality of the volumes which are to come, we may surely (without raising vain questions as to what he might have done if he had not been what he was) say that the last half of his life, though spent in cloud and shadow, has not been spent in vain.

  In the execution of minor verses, we think we could show that Hartley should have the praise of surpassing his father; but nevertheless it would be absurd, on a general view, to compare the two men, Samuel Taylor was so much bigger. What there was in his son was equally good, perhaps, but then there was not much of it; outwardly and inwardly he was essentially little. In poetry, for example, the father has produced two longish poems which have worked themselves right down to the extreme depths of the popular memory, and stay there very firmly; in part from their strangeness, but in part from their power. Of Hartley, nothing of this kind is to be found. He could not write connectedly: he wanted steadiness of purpose or efficiency of will to write so voluntarily; and his genius did not, involuntarily and out of its unseen workings, present him with continuous creations,—on the contrary, his mind teemed with little fancies, and a new one came before the first had attained any enormous magnitude. As his brother observed, he wanted “back thought.”

  Hartley Coleridge’s poetry reminds the reader of Wordsworth in nearly every line, though it is Wordsworth diluted; and at its best, the Lake poetry cannot bear much dilution. Excepting in the sonnets which relate to his own personal unhappiness, the poems sound like the echoes of other poets, rather than welling warm from the writer’s own heart. And though, in the personal sonnets referred to, he paints his purposeless life and blighted career in terse and poetic language, it were perhaps better that they had not been written at all. His poems addressed to Childhood are perhaps the most charming things in the collection. For poor Hartley loved children, and they returned his love. He loved women, too, but at a distance; and his despondency at his own want of personal attractions for them is a frequent theme of his poetry.

  Hartley Coleridge always classed himself among “the small poets,” and it is true he was not born for great and splendid achievements; but there are some writers for whom our affection would be less if they were stronger, more daring, more successful; and Hartley Coleridge is one of these…. A great poet is a toiler, even when his toil is rapturous. Hartley Coleridge did not and perhaps could not toil. Good thoughts came to him as of free grace; gentle pleasures possessed his senses; loving-kindnesses flowed from his heart, and took as they flowed shadows and colours from his imagination; and all these mingled and grew mellow. And so a poet’s moods expressed themselves in his verse; but he built no lofty rhyme. The sonnet, in which a thought and a feeling are wedded helpmates suited his genius; and of his many delightful sonnets some of the best are immediate transcripts of the passing mood of joy or pain…. All that Hartley Coleridge has written is genuine, full of nature, sweet, fresh, breathing charity and reconciliation. His poems of self-portrayal are many, and of these not a few are pathetic with sense of change and sorrowing self-condemnation; yet his penitence had a silver side of hope, and one whose piety was so unaffected, whose faith though “thinner far than vapour” had yet outlived all frowardness, could not desperately upbraid even his weaker self.

  His poems are full of graceful beauty, but almost all fall below the level of high poetry. They are not sufficiently powerful for vivid remembrance, and are much too good for oblivion. His striking fragment of “Prometheus” almost seems an exception; but although his brother attributes it to an earlier period, it is plainly composed under the influence of Shelley. The one species of composition in which he is a master is the sonnet, which precisely suited both his strength and his limitations. His sonnets are among the most perfect in the language.

  He saw with his own singular vision, felt with his own peculiar feelings, and spoke as if he were the first medium of expression; but true poet as he was he has made us realise also. He saw nature through rainbows, and he has left us the prisms of his poems. He wrote rapidly, and rarely with a pause, and became such an adept at the sonnet that he could usually complete one—subject to revision—within ten minutes. This is quite in keeping with the remarkable lucidity of his sonnets. From the first word to the last they sing themselves into a natural and gratifying silence. No more was intended by the writer; no more is needed by the reader. Bowles has the sonorous simplicity of Handel; but Hartley Coleridge has the sweet probing subtlety of Mozart.

  The son of a poet, and the son, by adoption, of two other poets, Hartley Coleridge might have proved his relationship to the Triumvirate of the Lakes more surely than he did if his career had not prematurely been blasted. His verse is not much read now, I fancy, but it ought to be, for it is better than the strong lines which are the fashion in this critical age.

  His “Prometheus,” a dramatic fragment, although regarded by S. T. Coleridge as “full of promise,” is poor indeed when compared with such poems as Keats’s “Hyperion,” or Shelley’s “Alastor.” And as regards the shorter lyrical poems which he composed, it must be admitted that, with one or two exceptions, they are somewhat thin and vapid. They indicate, it is true, considerable facility in writing, and much genial sympathy and kindness of heart, but they also discover, on the other hand, a feeble intellectual grip, and a defective insight into the facts and realities of the world in which we live. Very different, however, must be our criticism respecting his sonnets. The greatest poets—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth—have, for the most part, written the finest sonnets; Hartley Coleridge was not a great poet, but, as his brother Derwent justly observed, his sonnets will sustain comparison with those by Wordsworth.

  Many of the miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who has been very frequently in this century, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them…. Hartley Coleridge, if a “sair sicht” to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much, and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.

  Hartley Coleridge nowhere shows the supreme poetic gift his father possessed; but as in sheer genius the elder Coleridge was probably superior to any contemporary, so Hartley seems to have been the superior by endowment of any poet then writing, Tennyson and Browning alone excepted. Weakness of will, unfortunately, doomed him to excel only in short pieces, and to be far from uniform in these. It would have been wiser to omit the section of “playful and humorous” pieces. But the sonnets are very good, and some of them are excellent. A few of the songs take an equally high rank, especially the well-known “She is not fair to outward view,” and “’Tis sweet to hear the merry lark.” There are many suggestions of Wordsworth, but Hartley Coleridge is not an imitative poet. Without any striking originality he is fresh and independent. His verse betrays a gentle and kindly as well as a sensitive character. He evidently felt affection for all living things, and especially for all that was weak, whether from nature, age, or circumstance.