English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 19th century
Though Hartley Coleridge wrote prose as well, his name is now associated
only with his poems. A volume of these was published in 1833. It was
marked Vol. I., but no second ever appeared. The poems however were
re-edited, with additions, by Derwent Coleridge, in 1851. 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. Some of this feeling turns back, as it were,
upon himself, in the numerous and often pathetic poems in which he appears
to be contemplating his own history. He is of the school of Wordsworth in
his love for and his familiar communion with nature; and here at least he
gathered some fruit from the 'unchartered freedom' of his existence.
[Sidenote: Sara Coleridge (1802-1852).]
Hartley Coleridge belonged to a family unique in its power of
transmitting genius. His sister Sara likewise inherited intellectual and
imaginative gifts probably little if at all inferior to his; but
circumstances prevented her from making a great name. She married another
Coleridge of genius, her cousin, Henry Nelson, whose untimely death threw
a burden upon her, as editor of her father's literary remains, that
absorbed her time and energies. Her only book is _Phantasmion_, a fairy
tale, whose lyric snatches prove her worthy of remembrance among English
poetesses.
[Sidenote: William Motherwell (1797-1835).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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