[In this brief overview of Coleridge's poetry, Towle notes the influence of the Romantics on his work. Nature and memories of childhood are major themes in Coleridge's writing, according to Towle, and the majority of his poems are addressed to children.]

It is not surprising to find that Hartley Coleridge's poems, collected by his brother Derwent, published in 1851 with a prefatory Memoir, and again recently reissued with some additions in the “Muse's Library,” though rich in fancy and felicitous diction, are often the meditative records of very ordinary incidents.

He belonged to a school whereof the teachers, repudiating the artificial canons and sentiments of the eighteenth century, had sought their inspiration at the shrine of truth and in the heart of nature: “and poetry could never again be content to dance in a court dress with Pope, or go through a course of gymnastics with Dryden, or to sit by the fireside with Cowper, or to mount the pulpit with Young.”

The age grew sated with her sterile wit,
          Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
          And craved a living voice, a natural tone.

Imagination sought a higher region, a purer air. The office of poetry was not only to allure and captivate, but to instruct and exalt; and, above all, to be the authoritative exponent of beauty both in the moral and physical world.

For the unrestrained and devastating force of passion, destructive of lawful barriers and high ideals, Wordsworth had a severe condemnation and an instinctive repugnance. With reverential delight he had looked into “the face of common things,” and found, by reason of his love and reverence, their true interpretation. Moreover, the earnestness and dignity of his intellectual creed impressed itself upon thoughtful and cultivated minds, and led them on to a clearer appreciation of natural grace and truth.

At Wordsworth's side and in the study of his poetry, Hartley (though by no means blind to the defects and limitations of his master) had learned much of the same lore. His verse, both in thought and expression, bears the impress of his close acquaintance with the great poet. Wordsworth himself declared that Hartley's poetry lacked originality: a quality so impossible to define that it is difficult to disprove the assertion; and undoubtedly his lyrics and sonnets, in their painstaking and restrained purity of diction, are a reflection of the circle wherein he had been brought up, though in many instances displaying a pathos and tenderness of feeling peculiarly his own. It was almost by chance that some of his verse was preserved, for though his verbal memory for poetry was remarkable he could rarely remember his own.

The strange visions of his childhood had vanished, he no longer explored the untrodden tracks of unknown continents to meet with the indistinct and fearful shapes of beasts and reptiles, nor unrolled the genealogies of the long line of future kings who were to control the destinies of the world. His brain was not disturbed by metaphysical problems, nor his spirit oppressed by nightmare fantasies; unless it might be when, a solitary wanderer, he escaped for awhile from human companionship and the sheltered precincts of home. He knew nothing of the mystic region where his father's poems had had their birth or of “the finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruits of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative.” Hartley's Muse was, on the contrary, nourished and sustained by the simplest earthly means. He felt, possibly with justice, that pastoral and individual themes were best suited to his abilities. He loved nature in her mildest, most benignant mood. Though a dweller among the mountains, it was only in times of mental distress and under the pressure of an unconquerable desire to be alone that he fled to their wild recesses or their storm-encircled heights. But for the green flowering meadows, the rushes by the still margin of the lake, the springing delicate fern in the crevice of the rock, the pale clustering primroses, the rose-flushed snow of blossoming orchards, and all the offspring, however lowly, of the “breathing spring”; he had the eye of a poet and the heart of a lover.

His poetry was therefore not imitative in any formal sense of the word, but it was to some extent the result of atmosphere and association.

His moods are very various, tender and gay, descriptive rather than creative: the play of fancy like flickering sunlight, rather than the startling lurid gleams of a storm-tossed imagination. Even in his sadness he catches at each promise of joy, each stirring of gladness in the world around:—

                                                                                The little rills
That trickle down the yellow hills,
          To drive the fairies' water mills.
And every small bird trilling joyfully
          Tells a sweet tale of hope and love and peace.

.....

Such themes I sang—and such I fain would sing,
          Oft as the green buds show the summer near—
But what availeth me to welcome spring,
          When one dull winter is my total year?
When the pure snowdrops couch beneath the snow,
          And storms long-tarrying come too soon at last,
I see the semblance of my private woe,
          And tell it to the dilatory blast.
Yet will I hail the sunbeam as it flies—
          And bid the universal world be glad—
With my brief joy all souls shall sympathise—
          And only I, will all alone be sad.

Thus, though Nature may at times reflect his melancholy, she is more often the consoler, and brings peace and healing in her wings. Still, as he wanders by the quiet waters and seeks the shaded valley or the upland pastures, he can return in spirit to the days to which he refers in one of the first sonnets he ever wrote to “the faithful counsellor of his youth,” R. S. Jameson, afterwards Judge Advocate at Dominica:—

When we were idlers by the loitering rills,
          The need of human love we little noted;
Our love was nature and the peace which floated
          On the white mist and dwelt upon the hills.

Moreover, he was pre-eminently a poet of fancy, with no rationalistic prejudices to bid him shun enchanted ground, well fitted to wander with Puck and Oberon in a midsummer dream through the green mazes of a fairy wood; yet his observation is so exact and his quest of truth so dominant that no false lights are thrown upon a subject, and he is even austere in his rejection of meretricious effects. His fresh childlike wondering joy in purity and light and the loveliness of earth finds its expression in the simplest epithets.

                                                                                But one fault it hath;
It fits too close to life's realities.
In truth to Nature missing truth to Art;
For Art commends not counterparts or copies
But from our life a nobler life would shape,
Bodies celestial from terrestrial raise,
And teach us not jejunely what we are,
But what we may be when the Parian block
Yields to the hand of Phidias.

This Art may need the prophetic vision not granted to Hartley when the dreams of childhood had faded; and the poet's criticism, possibly first suggested by Wordsworth's poetry, recalls his own displeased exclamation when he saw Walter Scott taking notes of scenery: “Nature will not permit you to make an inventory of her charms.”

Yet Hartley's minute observation, whether directed to Nature or individuals, was accompanied by a large measure of spiritual insight—more an intuition than a talent. His pictures, subdued in colouring and manifestly true to life, are often mere sketches, recording some trivial passing fancy or quaint conceit that it pleased him to put into verse. There is nothing to dazzle or bewilder, but much to delight and captivate; and his talent was as apparent to a select circle of literary men as it had been to the poet guardians of his childhood. The grace and music of his versification, the elevation and restraint of his diction, appealed to cultivated critics, whilst his sensibility to natural influences brought the sights and sounds of earth before his readers in a few felicitous words:—

                                                                                The snow
Of sluggard winter bedded on the hill,
And the small trickle of the frozen rill.
The nightingale grew dumb—the cuckoo fled,
And broad-eyed summer glared on hill and plain.
The patient beauty of the scentless rose,
Oft with the Morn's hoar-crystal quaintly glassed,
Hangs a pale mourner for the summer past,
And makes a little summer where it grows.

All these things had a message and a meaning, and he loved them all. At times they were his only solace and refuge, more especially when, after some dark hour of subjection to his fatal infirmity, he shunned alike the companions of his fall and the silent pity of those who loved him best. There were then mysterious absences of which it is probable that only the whispering winds and the babbling streams could have told the story.

At other seasons, though his hearth was lonely his life was by no means solitary. His pleasant though eccentric ways, his humour, and his conversational gifts commended him to many chance acquaintances for whom he was ready to exercise his light impromptu talent of versification. It was the day of extract books and albums, and upon their pages many of his graceful fancies are inscribed. But it was in the innocence and charms of childhood that he found his truest inspiration. To that pure source he ever returned with fresh and inexhaustible pleasure. Without parental experience he had attained to a genuine and discriminating understanding of the infinite possibilities, the distinctions and significance of life in its earlier stages. The opening year with its unstained blossoms, the pale rose of the dawn, were more to him than the wealth and pride of summer or the full splendour of high noonday. At an infant's shrine he was not only a devout but an instructed worshipper. These small magicians could at any moment dispel his melancholy; “these thriftless prodigals of smiles and tears” were quick to arouse his tenderest affections. No other poet, as Professor Dowden observes, has been the laureate of so many baby boys and girls. It is true that he had been brought up amongst those to whom faith in childhood was an integral part of a poet's creed. To his father it was the anchor to which he clung amidst the wreckage of lost beliefs and treasured hopes. The guardians and friends of his own childhood had owned the same allegiance and with unfailing patience awaited the sometimes capricious or tardy fulfilment of early pledges. In his case, as he was well aware, disappointment, crushing and irrevocable, had fallen upon their expectations, and those pledges had been unredeemed. But not even the ever-present sense of personal failure could shake his confidence, and the star of hope still shone with mild and inextinguishable radiance over the birthplace and the cradle. Nor was childhood merely an ideal state of which the customs were strange and the language unfamiliar. He had indeed shrunk from the boisterous spirits or frank insubordination of the ordinary schoolboy and had found his position as a teacher intolerable, but little girls and babies had an especial attraction for him. The helplessness of childhood, the infirmities of age, and the sufferings of dumb animals awakened all his best sympathies and filled him with a passion of pity; and so it comes to pass that a large proportion of his poems are addressed to children, who shall enter heaven at the last great day,

Alike all blessed, and alike all fair,
And only God remembers who they were.

He always declared that as an infant he had been perfectly conscious of what was passing around him and much regretted his lack of speech.

Again and again he returns to the theme of the gladness and growth of childhood or to the mysterious state of passive infancy, a condition of “exile perfection to a world forlorn!”

Sure ’tis a holy and a healing thought
That fills my heart and mind at sight of thee
Thou purest abstract of humanity.

He reproved those who would assert that the mind whilst dumb is a blank, and saw in every unconscious look and gesture some revelation of the heaven within. Moreover, like a woman, he dwells with a delight, born of intimate knowledge, upon the minute loveliness of form and movement.

                                                            In the mere sentient life
Of unremembered infancy, whose speech
Like secret Love's is only smiles and tears.

When he writes of the strong grasp of a baby's hand, of its attitude in sleep, of its sudden spring of joy, its murmured love-notes and indiscriminating kisses, we are not surprised to hear that he might be found in the house of his friends or by a cottage fireside contentedly nursing a baby by the hour—thus giving practical effect to poetic theories.

Of love poems properly so called he gives few examples.

Though fond of women's society, in youth he had been constrained in their presence and hardly ventured to express wishes he felt must remain unfulfilled. Though in his letters and journals, as well as in his poems, he lays bare with unnecessary frankness the blotted records of his past, he can yet thank Heaven that at least no woman has been involved in the calamities that have wrecked his hopes. At no time does he appear to have felt so far worthy of a woman's love as to strive to win for himself a refuge from loneliness and despondency in the consolatory joys and salutary restraints of domestic life. His fancy may wander free, but he must wake to the consciousness that he is doomed to a solitary existence by his own infirmities.

“It must be so—my infant love must find
In my own heart a cradle and a grave.

So he writes in one of his sonnets. And whilst respecting his sentiments one cannot help feeling that love must indeed have been in its infancy or so desirable a self-control might hardly have been attained.

Nevertheless some of his most felicitous verses are inspired by women, never passionate, but graceful and chivalrous, tendered with a half-melancholy yet playful homage from one to whom nearer approach was forbidden, and frequently, like the following stanza, not only beautiful in diction but faithful in portraiture.

She was a queen of noble Nature's crowning,
A smile of hers was like an act of grace;
She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,
Like daily beauties of the vulgar race:
But if she smiled, a light was on her face,
A clear cool kindliness, a lunar beam
Of peaceful radiance, silvering o’er the stream
Of human thought with unabiding glory;
Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream,
A visitation bright and transitory.
But she has changed—hath felt the touch of sorrow;
No love hath she, no understanding friend.
Oh! grief when heaven is forced of earth to borrow
What the poor niggard earth hath not to lend.
But when the stalk is snapt, the rose must bend,
The tallest flower that skyward rears its head,
Grows from the common ground and there must shed
Its delicate petals. Cruel fate, too surely
That they should find so base a bridal bed,
Who lived in virgin pride so sweet and purely.

.....

’Tis vain to say—her worst of grief is only
The common lot which all the world have known;
To her ’tis more because her heart is lonely,
And yet she hath no strength to stand alone—
Once she had playmates, fancies of her own,
And she did love them. They are past away
As Fairies vanish at the break of day—
And like a spectre of an age departed
Or unsphered angel woefully astray—
She glides along—the solitary hearted.

Some charming poems are addressed to his Southey cousins and other girl relations, and one sonnet to “A Lofty Beauty from her Poor Kinsman,” demands a place in any review of his poetry.

Fair maid, had I not heard thy baby cries,
Nor seen thy girlish sweet vicissitude,
Thy mazy motions striving to elude,
Yet wooing still a parent's watchful eyes,
Thy humours many as the opal dyes,
And lovely all; methinks thy scornful mood,
And bearing high of stately womanhood,—
Thy brow where beauty sits to tyrannize
O’er humble love, had made me sadly fear thee;
For never sure was seen a royal bride,
Whose gentleness gave grace to so much pride—
My very thoughts would tremble to be near thee;
But when I see thee at thy father's side,
Old times unqueen thee, and old loves endear thee.

But multiplied extracts would fail to give a true idea of the variety and scope of his poetic talent, so frequently and easily exercised as by its very facility to persuade him to make light of its claims.

The fugitive character of his poetry, very unequal in merit, and seldom evincing sustained effort, was partly the outcome of abundant but unregulated leisure, and partly the result of a desultory mind. His attempt at a longer consecutive narrative, “Leonard and Susan,” has no great interest. It is somewhat prosaic in conception and has no dramatic force, whilst the tragedy is depressingly grim and grey. It would almost seem as if a personal theme could alone evoke the full expression of his poetic gifts. For their development he was eager to recognize the debt he owed to parental influence and education, and it was acknowledged in the Dedicatory Sonnet prefacing the first edition of his Poems.

Father and Bard revered! to whom I owe,
Whate’er it be, my little art of numbers
Thou, in thy night-watch o’er my cradled slumbers,
Didst meditate the verse that lives to show
(And long shall live, when we alike are low)
Thy prayer how ardent, and thy hopes how strong,
That I should learn of Nature's self the song,
The love which none but Nature's pupils know.
The prayer was heard: I ‘wandered like a breeze’
By mountain brooks and solitary meres,
And gathered there the shapes and fantasies
Which, mixed with passions of my sadder years,
Compose this book. If good therein there be,
That good, my sire, I dedicate to thee.

As regards literary influences, he was almost over-scrupulously anxious to note in an Appendix obligations to other poets or chance reflections of their productions. With a curious mixture of humility and confidence—high hopes of possible attainments easily dashed by a consciousness of weakness and failure—he was inclined to form too low an estimate of his poetry. In respect to metre and diction it may have been the result of close and critical study of great masters in the art, but the motive and the thought was individual and natural. It resembled an air played with executive delicacy upon a fine and intricate instrument. Nevertheless his own lines sincerely represent his conception of his powers and limitations.

No hope have I to live a deathless name
          A power immortal in the world of mind,
A sun to light with intellectual flame
          The universal soul of human kind.
Not mine the skill in memorable phrase
          The hidden truths of passion to reveal,
To bring to light the intermingling ways,
          By which unconscious motives darkling steal.
I have no charm to renovate the youth
          Of old authentic dictates of the heart,—
To wash the wrinkles from the face of Truth,
          And out of Nature form creative Art.

And yet he can claim to have sought and seen the vision and the gleam, and to have spent his life in the unrequited service of

Divinest Poesy!—’tis thine to make
          Age young, youth old—to baffle tyrant Time,
From antique strains the heavy dust to shake,
          And with familiar face to crown new rhyme.
Long have I loved thee—long have loved in vain,
          Yet large the debt my spirit owes to thee,
Thou wreath’dst my first hours in a rosy chain,
          Rocking the cradle of my infancy.
The lovely images of earth and sky
          From thee I learn’d within my heart to treasure;
And the strong magic of thy minstrelsy
          Charms the world's tempest to a sweet sad measure.
Nor Fortune's spite—nor hopes that once have been—
          Hopes which no power of fate can give again—
Not the sad sentence—that my life must wean
          From dear domestic joys—not all the train
Of frequent ill—and penitential harms
          That dog the rear of youth unwisely wasted,
Can dim the lustre of thy stainless charms
          Or sour the sweetness that in thee I tasted.

His personal poems, though they never strike the deeper notes of passion, have been well described as “detaining the fleeting lights of a most affectionate fancy. Those lights might sometimes be called lunar gleams; but they are the moonlight of a warm climate.”

Of all the modern poets he may perhaps be said to display the strongest likeness to Charles Turner Tennyson. From the remote Lincolnshire Vicarage, from the man of saintly character and the minister of Christ, there come strains which might almost be mistaken for those of the Vagabond minstrel.