[In this critical overview of Poems,Hartman notes the technical skill of Coleridge's sonnets, remarking on the strong influence Wordsworth had on the younger poet.]

Poems: (Songs and Sonnets) by Hartley Coleridge, issued by Bingley at Leeds early in 1833,¹ is the slender octavo volume upon which rests the poetic reputation of the son of S. T. C. ‘Some writers’, the author wrote a decade later, ‘maintain a sort of dubious, twilight existence, from their connection with others of greater name. … If aught of mine be preserved from oblivion, it will be owing to my bearing the name of Coleridge, and having enjoyed, I fear with less profit than I ought, the acquaintance of Southey and Wordsworth.’ Elsewhere he modestly refers to his ‘knack of verse’ as entitling him to rank as ‘one of the small poets’—and no more. And like Bowles and Lamb, with whom—as poets—he has been appropriately edited, he must be sifted among the minor lyrists of the great Romantic Movement. ‘His Muse’, said the Edinburgh Review after his death, ‘never lifted either the trumpet of the moral Prophet, or the lyre of the rapt and mystic Bard … she interpreted between him and his neighbours.’ Yet for this very reason posterity has seen fit to accord him a special place among his peers. Derivative as is the general tenor of his work, his sonnets have been called among the most perfect in the language,² admitting him to the immortal companionship ‘even with Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth’. While in all his best poetry he put to such use the disappointment and wistful misdirection of his vagrant life that, for self-portraiture, much of it is unique. The stamp of his bizarre personality—dazzling, tender, fitful, elusive, sad—is upon all his work. Not without reason he has been variously called the dalesmen's laureate, and, towards the end of his days, the laureate of children.

This sole volume of his poems issued during his lifetime embraces (in 157 pages, of which the last 13 are notes) some forty-five sonnets, sixteen stanzaic pieces, thirteen songs, five works in couplets (epistles, Valentines, &c.), five in blank verse (including the long narrative ‘Leonard and Susan’), two translations (Horace and Petrarch), an epigram, an epitaph, and a group of album verses. For such mixed fare the reader is duly prepared by the title-page, where Drayton's lines are cited:

I write, endite, I point, I raze, I quote,
I interline, I blot, correct, I note,
I make, allege, I imitate, I feign.

Here, surely, is no young poet overawed with a sense of his own hierophancy, no solicitor of laurels not his due. ‘I neither deprecate’, he says in the Preface, ‘nor defy the censure of the critics. No man can know, of himself, whether he is, or is not, a poet.’ And he further recognizes his want of invention, disarming the source-hunter by notes scrupulously acknowledging his debts to other writers. Finally, in his Dedicatory Sonnet to S. T. C., ‘Father, and Bard revered’, he supinely bestows the credit for his ‘little art of numbers’ upon his sire.

As one turns the pages, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that in manner and mood Wordsworth at his best, rather than Coleridge at his worst (the S. T. C. ‘to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear’), is most frequently his model³—the ‘mighty Seer’ to whom he wrote

Of Nature's inner shrine thou art the priest,
Where most she works when we perceive her least.(4)

In his preference for the sonnet (a form within whose limits S. T. C. rarely restrained his genius—and with little success); in his preoccupation with children, lovingly celebrated in birthday sonnets, mannered lyrics, epitaph, and valentine; in the sad overtones of memory, of emotions likewise ‘recollected in tranquillity’; in the neo-Platonic vein of preexistence (which Wordsworth himself seems to have absorbed from S. T. C. via Proclus, Fénelon, &c.); and especially in his nature poems, instinct with life in the shadow of Helvellyn and within hearing of the Rotha—more particularly in his love of the lakeland flowers (the flow’rets of that prose idyll, Dorothy's Journal)—in all these aspects of Hartley's poetry there is the superscription of Wordsworth. His most ambitious narrative, ‘Leonard and Susan’, is a brief homely epic confessedly Wordsworthian both in structure and genre. Finally, most of his notes, acknowledging lifted phrases and ideas, refer unhesitatingly to the sage of Rydal Mount, his patron, benefactor, and lifelong friend.⁵

The reasons for this discipleship, of course, are not far to seek. Although Hartley learned the habit—if not the art—of versifying as a child from his parent, it was to Wordsworth that he turned, as a young man in his father's absence, for counsel, sympathy, and shelter. Wordsworth's library had been one of his places of refuge from the Ambleside school of his boyhood. The Ode, which Hartley as a child partly inspired, he believed to be ‘decidedly the finest in any language’. And while in old age, indeed in middle age, he shrank in remorse from contact with the aging, opinionated, spoiled, and often crabbed old Tory that Wordsworth became, Hartley never ceased to venerate the Laureate, uncompanionable as he then seemed. Furthermore, in the widening disparity between S. T. C. and Wordsworth, in temperament, creed, purpose, and aesthetic—familiar first of all in the preface to the second Lyrical Ballads—Hartley, whose childhood metaphysics were dissipated in tavern talk, took early his unfilial departure to the side of Wordsworth. In a sonnet to his father he confessed (and from this distance there is an innocent accent of travesty where only reverence was intended)

Thou walk’dst the earth in penury and pain,
Thy great Idea was too high a strain
For my infirmity.

Surely here is a paradox, that the first-born of the Logician, Metaphysician, Bard (Coleridge's life simply reversed Lamb's order), the child of all-but-Pantisocracy, should turn, with congenital atrophy of will and impaired talents, back to the dalesmen's ingle-nooks, the highways and public houses of the vale of Windermere. ‘My poetry’, wrote the city- and cloister-bred S. T. C. of his early work, ‘is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery’; again, ‘I wished to force myself out of metaphysical trains of thought, which, when I wished to write a poem, beat up game of far other kind. Instead of a covey of poetic partridges with whirring wings of music, or wild ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular (a still better image of verse), up came a metaphysical bustard, urging its slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming flight over dreary and level wastes.’

But thou, my babe! shalt wander
like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains …

‘As far as regards the habitats of my childhood,’ Hartley wrote, ‘these lines written at Nether Stowey, were almost prophetic.’ ‘But poets’, he hastens to add, ‘are not prophets.’

Turning once more to the volume of Poems we find a division of the book into parts: a series of thirty-four sonnets; then a miscellaneous remainder, with a few sonnets interspersed, listed as ‘Thoughts and Fancies’. It is, of course, the former—a sequence only in so far as the majority reflect twilight moods of reverie in a contrite heart—which accord Hartley an indisputably high rank among the English sonneteers. Three or four will serve here to show their excellence.

Wordsworth would seem to be the subject of the fifth:

What was’t awaken’d first the untried ear
Of that sole man who was all human kind?
Was it the gladsome welcome of the wind,
Stirring the leaves that never yet were sere?
The four mellifluous streams which flow’d so near,
Their lulling murmurs all in one combined?
The note of bird unnamed? The startled hind
Bursting the brake—in wonder, not in fear,
Of her new lord? Or did the holy ground
Send forth mysterious melody to greet
The gracious pressure of immaculate feet?
Did viewless seraphs rustle all around,
Making sweet music out of air as sweet?
Or his own voice awake him with its sound?

Most noteworthy perhaps of all his sonnets in its combination of simple, moving diction and self-portraiture is the following, a fit epitaph for the prematurely grey young poet:

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I;
For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sleep, is only sleep, and waking,
I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, tho’ I be old,
Time is my debtor for my years untold.(6)

How tenderly Hartley could turn to the uses of the sonnet the natural piety that filled, for Wordsworth and himself, ‘her best home, the lowly-loving heart’, is evident in ‘November’:

The mellow year is hasting to its close;
The little birds have almost sung their last,
Their small notes twitter in the dreary blast—
That shrill-piped harbinger of early snow;
The patient beauty of the scentless rose,
Oft with the Morn's hoar crystal quaintly glass’d,
Hangs, a pale mourner for the summer past,
And makes a little summer where it grows:
In the chill sunbeam of the faint brief day
The dusky waters shudder as they shine,
The russet leaves obstruct the straggling way
Of oozy brooks, which no deep banks define,
And the gaunt woods, in ragged, scant array,
Wrap their old limbs with sombre ivy twine.

Finally in this group is his oft-quoted sonnet ‘To a Lofty Beauty [Edith Southey], from her Poor Kinsman’, with its moving conclusion:

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.

That Hartley Coleridge was not only a phrase-borrower in the Wordsworth tradition (see, for example, the latter's ‘Evening Walk’ and notes), but a victim of other conventions as well, is clearly shown in the less distinguished pieces of this sonnet section. There are the familiar apostrophes to love⁷ and appeals to Fancy of all the Romantics (poets and poetasters alike); there is a sonnet ‘On a Picture of the Corpse of Napoleon lying in State’; there is a ‘Youth, thou art fled’, followed by ‘I thank my God because my hairs are grey!’; there are sonnets to Wordsworth and Shakespeare; there is the octave-sestet tilt between town and country (his homesickness upon arrival in Leeds); and there is the inevitable translation of Petrarch. Expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta.

‘Thoughts and Fancies’, the second and longer division of the volume, represents a change of mood as well as of form. Although they were not his happiest exercises, Hartley's occasional verses, his album rhymes, were the medium in which his peculiar fanciful genius was freest to disport. In these indeed he could lead his ‘Pegasus a steeple-hunting’ and ‘make believe to hang his careless harp upon a willow tree’—in lyric, panegyric, epigram, narrative, love-ditty, medley, translation, and valentine. ‘I love albums’, he confessed in a note. ‘They sometimes procure a sunny look, or a kind word, for some hard-favoured son of the muse, that else might wither in the “shade of cold neglect”. Surely there is a moral value in whatever enables a poor man to confer a kindness.’ And in one album at least he penned lines (a sonnet to Wordsworth) in august company: Dora Wordsworth's Keepsake was to include both Laureates, both Coleridges, L. E. L., Crabbe, Rogers, Scott, Lockhart, the Lambs, Campbell, Moore, Landor, Hunt, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold—‘a book’, wrote the last-mentioned, ‘which of world-famous souls Kept the memorial.’⁸

Not all, however, of Hartley's ‘Thoughts and Fancies’ are mere album verse. Many are strikingly above that level set by Letitia Landon and his prolific Lakeland neighbour, ‘Infelicia’ Hemans. Their very variety lifts them above such a category; and only rarely do they incline to what S. T. C. called the ‘namby-pamby genus’ of his own early verse.⁹ Stanzas on conventional themes may abound, often in familiar idiom; but the Coleridge impress of high talent is not long absent, as in the lines ‘She was a queen of noble Nature's crowning’:

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.

‘When a man is unhappy’, the elder Coleridge once put it quite bluntly, ‘he writes damn bad poetry, I find.’ But through the most barren reaches of his son's verses go dancing elfin lines and images: ‘the tip-toe levity of spring’, ‘unmeet historian of a golden time’, ‘holy and quiet as a hermit's dream’. From his earliest Miltonizing, through stanzas reminiscent of Spenser and Gray, he tried—too frequently in vain—to disengage his muse from eighteenth-century diction,¹⁰ to get ‘beyond the sulphurous bolts of fabled Jove’:

Yet write he must, for still he needs must eat—
Retail fantastic sorrow by the sheet—
Sing in his garret of the flowery grove,
And pinch’d with hunger, wail the woes of love.

The ‘Thoughts and Fancies’ section of the volume contains many laboured and undistinguished stanzas—half-hearted album verse, sincere but commonplace ditties, pious addresses to infants, New Year and birthday greetings, vapid philosophical epistles, translations of Horace and ‘Lines’ in the manner of the century before—but amid all these, the Parnassian foothills of any minor poet, several lyrics and fancies lift their heads for the culling. Of these by far the most celebrated is his ‘Song’:

She is not fair to outward view
          As many maidens be,
Her loveliness I never knew
          Until she smil’d on me;
Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.
But now her looks are coy and cold,
          To mine they ne’er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
          The love-light in her eye:
Her very frowns are fairer far,
Than smiles of other maidens are.(11)

This, the unanimous choice of anthologists, has something of a companion lyric in the concluding stanzas of ‘Reply’:

She pass’d away like morning dew
          Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
          The meaning of a sigh.
As round the rose its soft perfume,
          Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew—while mortal doom
          Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.
Love was her guardian Angel here,
          But love to death resign’d her;
Tho’ love was kind, why should we fear,
          But holy death is kinder?

Such successful lyrics, however, are few and far between in the entire scope of Hartley Coleridge's poetry. His muse seems more at home among more sportive themes, as in ‘A Medley’, where with changing metre he pursues a substance for his song:

Shall I sing of little rills,
That trickle down the yellow hills,
To drive the Fairies' water-mills? …
What if we have lost the creed,
Which thought the brook a God indeed?(12) …
Or imagined, in the lymph,
The semblance of a virgin nymph,
With panting terror, flying ever,
From hairy Satyrs' foul endeavour? …

—not here, but in the ‘happy, happy faith’ of his boyhood he chooses still to disport, in the illusions of childhood, in the veracities of fairydom; these, he sings, tell a ‘sweet tale of hope, and love, and peace’. These, with their ‘momentary fits of laughter’, will be his theme. Then suddenly the gay lyric swings characteristically into a grave requiem:

—But what availeth me to welcome spring,
          When one dull winter is my total year.
When the pure snow-drops 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 joys all souls shall sympathise—
          And only I, will all alone be sad.

This sadness, rooted in contrition, overshadows nearly all of Hartley Coleridge's poetry. To this self-debasing sense of irrecoverable worth, of spent genius and unfulfilled heritage, he returns, even in his vagaries, again and again. It is the sole theme wherein are defined for him all the burden and the mystery of life, whose muse, like his father's, was seldom ‘wholly un-birdlimed’. Only rarely does the affable side of his nature dispel such melancholy, in occasional bursts of whimsy such as the ‘Address to Certain Gold Fishes’:

Harmless warriors, clad in mail
Of silver breastplate, golden scale …
As gay, as gamesome, and as blithe,
As light, as loving, and as lithe,
As gladly earnest in your play,
As when ye gleam’d in far Cathay. …

Yet even here (in the humanitarian convention of his forbears) the goldfish, like Mrs. Throckmorton's bullfinch, must be identified with the Romantic School:

And yet, since on this hapless earth
There’s small sincerity in mirth,
And laughter oft is but an art
To drown the outcry of the heart;
It may be, that your ceaseless gambols,
Your wheelings, dartings, divings, rambles,
Your restless roving round and round
The circuit of your crystal bound,—
If but the task of weary pain,
And endless labour, dull and vain;
And while your forms are gaily shining,
Your little lives are inly pining!(13)

—creatures indeed among whom Horace Walpole's cat might appropriately have been drowned, and over whose bowl S. T. C. in his youth might have shed a glistening Pantisocratic tear.¹⁴

Of the mass of inconsequential verse that he wrote—New Year's greetings, Valentines, birthday stanzas, reflections, and the like—Hartley was his own best critic. Recognizing his own limitations, acutely aware of his exclusion from the highest order of poets,¹⁵ he penned his own self-searching lines on ‘Poietes Apoietes’:

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.

These, he seems to say, he would leave perforce to Wordsworth and to S. T. C., through whose ministrations divine Poesy rocked the cradle of his infancy. He continues:

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.

Child of the Muse that he was, he had long loved Poesy in vain, for reasons implicit in the closing lines of his address to her:

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—nor all the train
Of pregnant ills—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.

To restore the balance, however, which properly belongs to any consideration of Hartley's poetic output, the 1833 volume ends with a few miscellaneous sonnets. In this form, his special terrain, the heights to which his halting muse could on occasion ascend are evident in the lines to Homer (the improved version found in Derwent's edition):

Far from the sight of earth, yet bright and plain
As the clear noon-day sun, an ‘orb of song’
Lovely and bright is seen amid the throng
Of lesser stars, that rise, and wax, and wane,
The transient rulers of the fickle main;—
One constant light gleams through the dark and long
And narrow aisle of memory. How strong,
How fortified with all the numerous train
Of truths wert thou, Great Poet of mankind,
Who told'st in verse as mighty as the sea,
And various as the voices of the wind,
The strength of passion rising in the glee
Of battle. Fear was glorified by thee,
And Death is lovely in thy tale enshrined.

‘What manner of man’, asks a critic in the Temple Bar Magazine, ‘was the writer of these poems? Something may be surmised even from these few and casual relics [i.e. previously unpublished sonnets and notes]. A man of ready sympathy and old-fashioned courtesy; of strong sense and delicate sensibility; affectionate and pious; of pleasant humour and curious learning; well read in English poetry and himself possessed of some poetic gift, a “knack of verse”, as he phrased it in the modesty of his later years.’¹⁶ Indeed for such an impression of the man himself one need read no farther than Hartley's own Preface to the Poems:

‘The thoughts, the feelings, the images, which are the material of poetry, are accessible to all who seek for them; but the power to express, combine, and modify—to make a truth of thought, to earn a sympathy for feeling, to convey an image to the inward eye, with all its influences and associations, can only approve itself by experiment—and the result of the experiment may not be known for years. Such an experiment I have ventured to try, and I wait the result with patience. Should it be favourable, the present volume will shortly be followed by another, in which, if no more be accomplished, a higher strain is certainly attempted.’

Bingley's bankruptcy and Hartley's own indisposition, as we shall see, precluded the supplementary volume of poems during the poet's own lifetime, although two years after his brother's death Derwent edited the miscellaneous verses of his later years. Greater in number and more diversified as they are, the posthumous poems fail to attain the ‘higher strain’ he promised; like Wordsworth's, Hartley's later work becomes sicklied o’er with piety. Only a few scattered sonnets keep to the level of his earlier work in this form.

For one who in petulant mood wrote

Oh may all Christian souls while yet ’tis time,
Renounce the World, the Flesh, the Devil, and Rhyme,

something remains to be said touching his derivative talents. Hartley Coleridge was the child, by birth and association, of the forbears of the Romantic Movement; he was thus a generation too late for innovation, for another gospel, or a new aesthetic. Tiny philosopher that he was in childhood, he early renounced metaphysical speculation and outgrew his taste for the Gothic manner that fired his boyhood dreams. He grew up with and into an era of sentiment and industrialism, when great poetry had passed with the pre-Waverley Scott, Wordsworth, S. T. C., Shelley, Keats, and Byron; when political upheaval, the encroachment of science, and changing economic standards had deafened the national ear to strains of the muse. Hartley's Poems appeared the year after the Reform Bill of 1832—‘that huge tapeworm lie of some threescore and ten yards’, his father called it—when the tidal wave of Romanticism had left the literature of its wake in the charge of poetasters. A spurious sentimentality was in the air. Scott's novels supplanted even Byron's Oriental epics with an incalculably large public, while the annuals teemed with the purlings of Mrs. Hemans, Montgomery, Procter, Joanna Baillie, and the saccharine insipidity of Letitia Landon. Chronologically, Hartley had no choice, admitting himself to be

                                                  —a petty man of rhyme,
Nursed in the softness of a female time.

The old order was, before his very eyes, yielding place to new; the Victorian era was at hand. With Carlyle fingering the stops of his trumpet, and Dickens becoming a staff reporter for the Morning Chronicle, Tennyson (whom Hartley met and admired, enjoying ‘the perfume that exhales from [his] pure soul’) began writing poetry which he was later to delete. All in all, as he sensed, it was indeed ‘a dubious, twilight existence’ for the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Although he has a poetic kinship with the youthful S. T. C. of fugitive pieces and eighteenth-century mannerisms, Hartley disagreed with his father's dictum and practice that ‘a great poet must be implicité, if not explicité, a profound metaphysician’. Returning, after being buffeted about by diverse winds of chance, to ‘wander like a breeze’ in the Lakeland, he chose the people of Wordsworth's poetry for his companions—and became, far more than the bard himself, their friend and laureate. In their simplicity and goodness, as well as in their readiness to tipple and willingness to listen, he found what he long had sought: a modest folk to live among, freedom from obligation, responsibility, or duty, and a land of windmills to tilt with in the Ejuxria of his solitude. ‘The completest originals in the world’, he wrote in an essay, ‘are your plain, matter-of-fact, every-day folks, that never utter a word but what they mean.’ So it was by choice that he would ensconce himself in the ingle-nook of some cottier's house; that he became a familiar figure and byword, a sort of genius loci among the sheep-shearers, farmers, and dalesmen.

Oh! what a faith were this, if human life indeed were but a summer's dream, and sin and sorrow but a beldame's tale, and death the fading of a rainbow, or the sinking of a breeze into quiet air; if all mankind were lovers and poets, and there were no truer pain than the first sigh of love, or the yearning after ideal beauty; if there were no dark misgivings, no obstinate questionings, no age to freeze the springs of life, and no remorse to taint them.

Notes

1. Reissued the same year by John Cross, Leeds; also by Baldwin & Craddock, London.

2. e.g., by Edward Garnett, Dict. Nat. Biog.

3. ‘somebody has borrowed my Wordsworth and I’m like a Jack Tar without his tobacco pouch’—MS. letter (August 1830).

4. Although, in 1820, he agreed with his parent about the ‘unhealthful’ nature-worship of Wordsworth—‘while the odd introduction of the popular, almost the vulgar, religion in his later publications (the popping in, as Hartley says, of the old man with a beard), suggests the painful suspicion of worldly prudence’ (Letters, ed. Allsop, 71).

5. ‘It is a pity’, Wordsworth wrote to Dyce in December 1833, ‘that Mr. Hartley Coleridge's sonnets had not been published before your collection was made, as there are several well worthy of a place in it.’ Not the least was that to Wordsworth himself, for celebrating ‘the thoughts that make The life of souls, the truths for whose dear sake We to ourselves and to our God are dear’ (Poems, ed. Colles, 10).

6. First published in the annual Winter's Wreath (1831), 322.

7. ‘Another source of this silly sameness of love-verses is the notion that a lover must compose as well as dress in the height of the fashion. Hence the endless repetition of stock phrases and similes—the impertinent witticism—the wilful exclusion of plain sense and plain English—the scented, powdered, fringed, and furbelowed coxcombry of quality love-poets.’—‘Love-Poetry.’

8. Dora Wordsworth: Her Book, ed. F. V. Morley, 1925.

9. Letters, i. 54; cf. Poems, Oxford ed., i. 45 n. 1.

10. ‘Never was there an age which strained so hard after originality as the present—yet it is not an original age. It is indeed somewhat original, to discover that Pope and Dryden were no poets; and so it would be to demonstrate that the moon is made of green cheese.’—Essays, i. 71.

11. First printed in The Gem, ed. Thomas Hood, i (1829), 21-2. To this annual, Lamb, Scott, John Clare, and others had contributed, along with ‘the late John Keats' (Tennyson appeared in the 1831 volume). Hartley wrote to Hood from Bingley's home at Leeds: ‘I believe you are neither Whig, Tory, nor Radical High-Churchman, Puritan, or Socinian—that you have a sensible contempt for the whole race of -ologies and isms, with a most kindly disposition towards all -ologists, ists, and inians. … If I possess any humour at all—it is of the Shandean school, and not according to the taste of the times,’ &c. (MS. letter in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Hartley planned to dedicate to Hood a contemplated humorous anthology of his own prose and verse (‘I mean would-be humorous’).

12. Cf. his note to the song ‘’Tis sweet to hear the merry lark’: ‘In fact, nature is very little obliged to the heathen mythology. The constant anthropomorphism of the Greek religion sorely perplexed the ancient conceptions of natural beauty. A river is turned into a god, who is still too much of a river to be quite a god. It is a statue of ice in a continual state of liquefaction.’ (Poems, 1833 ed., 152.)

13. Comparison is inevitable with Rupert Brooke's ‘Heaven’—where, all fish trust,

                                                      there swimmeth One
    Who swam ere rivers were begun,
    Immense, of fishy form and mind,
    Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
    And under that Almighty Fin,
    The littlest fish may enter in …

14. ‘I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect and Jack Asses I love: for Aldermen and Hogs, Bishops and Royston Crows I have not particular partiality—; they are my Cousins, however, at least by Courtesy,’ &c. (S. T. C. to Rev. Wrangham, October 24, 1794. Letter cited by Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 573).

15. ‘Poetry, as regards small poets, may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations’ (S. T. C., Letters, ed. Allsop, 118).

16. J. K. Hudson, ‘Hartley Coleridge, with some Unpublished Letters and Verses’, Temple Bar Magazine, cxxvii (1903), 409-22 (reprinted Living Age, ccxxxvii. 574 ff.). ‘For myself’, Hartley wrote, ‘I find it easier to write simply in verse than in prose.’—MS. letter. Again:

                                                                                              ‘Easier far
    The minuet step of slippery sliding verse
    Than the strong stately walk of steadfast prose.’

    —MS. blank verse epistle to Sara.