By way, it is likely, of compensation to Hartley for this great deficiency in what his father imagined to be his own _forte_,—the power of conceiving a whole,—Hartley possessed, in a considerable degree, a species of sensibility to which the former was nearly a stranger. ‘The mind of S. T. Coleridge,’ says one who had every means of knowing and observing, ‘was not in the least under the influence of external objects.’ Except in the writings written during daily and confidential intimacy with Wordsworth (an exception that may be obviously accounted for), no trace can perhaps be found of any new image or metaphor from natural scenery. There is some story too of his going for the first time to York, and by the Minster, and never looking up at it. But Hartley’s poems exhibit a great sensibility to a certain aspect of exterior nature, and great fanciful power of presenting that aspect in the most charming and attractive forms. It is likely that the London boyhood of the elder Coleridge was,—added to a strong abstractedness which was born with him,—a powerful cause in bringing about the curious mental fact, that a great poet, so susceptible to every other species of refining and delightful feeling, should have been utterly destitute of any perception of beauty in landscape or nature. We must not forget that S. T. Coleridge was a blue-coat boy,—what do any of them know about fields? And similarly, we require in Hartley’s case, before we can quite estimate his appreciation of nature, to consider his position, his circumstances, and especially his time. Now it came to pass in those days that William Wordsworth went up into the hills. It has been attempted in recent years to establish that the object of his life was to teach Anglicanism. A whole life of him has been written by an official gentleman, with the apparent view of establishing that the great poet was a believer in rood-lofts, an idolator of piscinæ. But this is not capable of rational demonstration. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, began life as a heretic, and as the shrewd Pope unfallaciously said, ‘once a heretic, always a heretic.’ Sound men are sound from the first; safe men are safe from the beginning, and Wordsworth began wrong. His real reason for going to live in the mountains was certainly in part sacred, but it was not in the least Tractarian:— ‘For he with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of nature.’ His whole soul was absorbed in the one idea, the one feeling, the one thought, of the sacredness of hills.