This last (which appeared in its second form as _Lives of Northern Worthies_, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of _Poems_ and _Essays_. In the former Hartley has no kind of _souffle_ (or long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the sound--not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music--is unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"), and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. 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 frequent 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.