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'to paroxysms of rage, often the disguise of pity, self-accusation, or other painful emotion-anger it could hardly be called — during which he bit his arm or finger violently. He yielded, 'as it were unconsciously, to slight temptations, slight in themselves, and slight to him, as if swayed by a mechanical impulse apart from his own volition. It looked like an organic defect -a congenital imperfection.' Apparently he was not himself without forebodings. They are referred to in a letter from Mr. Chauncey Hare Townshend, who became acquainted with Hartley Coleridge during his college life, and mentions many interesting particulars connected with him. On one occasion, during a summer vacation which he passed at Greta Hall, he recited in Mr. Townshend's presence Wordsworth's poem, 'Re'solution and Independence,' in which the poet, illustrating a mood of despondency, says

'And fears and fancies thick upon me came;

Dim sadness and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.' 'Hartley here stopped, and there was a pause of silence, broken by his saying, in somewhat of an altered and lower tone "I cannot tell you how exactly this and other expressions in this grand poem of Wordsworth's hit my mood at certain times so exclusively as almost to render me unobservant of its corrective and higher tendencies. The fear that kills, and hope that is unwilling to be fed' — These I have known; I have even heard a voice, yes, not like a creation of the fancy, but an audible and sensuous voice, foreboding evil to me.""

His life at Oxford determined the character of his future career. Its miscarriage, as his brother touchingly remarks, deprived him of the residue of his years.' The difficulties with which his peculiar nature had to contend on that novel field cannot be better illustrated than by an extract from a letter to his brother, when all was over:

'With few habits but those of negligence and self-indulgence, with principles honest indeed and charitable, but not ascetic, and little applied to particulars, with much vanity and much diffidence, a wish to conquer, neutralised by a fear of offending, with wavering hopes, uncertain spirits, and peculiar manners, I was sent among men, mostly irregular, and in some instances vicious. Left to myself to form my own course of studies, my own acquaintances, my own habits; to keep my own hours, and in a great measure to be master of my own time, few know how much I went through; how many shocks I received from within and without; how many doubts, temptations, half-formed ill resolutions passed through my mind. I saw human nature in a new point of view, and in some measure learned to judge of mankind by a new standard. I ceased to look for virtues which I no longer hoped to find, and set, perhaps, a disproportionate value

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on those which most frequently occurred. The uncertainty of my prospects cast a gloom on what was before me. The complex effect of all this discontent and imprudence was, of course, self-reproach, inconsistency, quickly formed, and quickly broken resolutions, just enough caution to lose my reputation for frankness, increasing dread of my consocii, incapability of proceeding in any fixed plan, and an extreme carelessness whenever the painful restraint was removed.'

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Notwithstanding the defects here so sternly commented on, Hartley Coleridge's Oxford life was far from being a blank; nor could he say with respect to it, I have lost the race I never 'ran.' He not only acquired great social celebrity from his wit and eloquence, but he read hard, and gained the expected prize. He obtained a fellowship at Oriel with high distinction, his superiority not admitting of a doubt. His brother thus continues the narrative:

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'A proud and happy day was it for me, and for us all, when these tidings reached us. Obviously unfit for the ordinary walks of professional life, he had earned for himself an honourable independence, and had found, as it seemed, a position in which he could exert his peculiar talents to advantage. But a sad reverse was at hand. At the close of his probationary year he was judged to have forfeited his Oriel fellowship, on the ground, mainly, of intemperance. Great efforts were made to reverse the decision. . . . A life singularly blameless in all other respects, dispositions the most amiable, principles and intentions the most upright and honourable, might be pleaded as a counterpoise in the opposite scale. It was to no purpose. The sentence might be considered severe; it could not be said to be unjust; and alas! my poor brother did not take the only course which could have discredited the verdict of his judges. infirmity which was thus heavily visited was not subsequently overcome.'

The

The rest of his life may be narrated in few words. He lived in London for about two years after leaving Oxford, and passed his time writing for various magazines, projecting graver works, cultivating friendly relations, and now and then embodying in verse the accidents of the moment. The three exquisite sonnets to a Friend,' with which his first volume commences, are a record of the joy with which he at this time met in London Robert Jameson, the early companion of his mountain wanderings. We can but find room for one of them:

'When we were idlers with 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 among the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills;

One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That wisely doating, asked not why it doated,
And ours the unknown joy that knowing kills.
But now I find how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
Of that fair beauty which no eye can see,

Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.'

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(Vol. i. p. 5.)

To this period belongs the fragment of Prometheus,' left unfinished, and not completed afterwards, in part because the subject had in the mean time been appropriated by Shelley. It displays much beauty of thought and imagery, as well as much metrical facility; but if the subject was not too stern a one for the author, at least it was above the years which he then had.' The poem is not conceived with that simplicity and grandeur which the mighty myth required. The former quality, indeed, is wanting even in Shelley's splendid version of it; and whole pages of cloudy or of crude metaphysics perplex a poem which might have been rendered first-rate with little aid but that of a pair of scissors. Shelley, however, possessed all the high energy necessary, considering the model whom he emulated rather than imitated; and his work is sufficient to prove that he had strength to bend the bow of Ulysses, though not skill to send the arrow home to the classic mark. Between such a theme and the gentler genius of Hartley Coleridge, there was perhaps as little congeniality as between the suffering Titan and the chorus of Sylphs whom the northern poet sends to console him. The best part of the poem is the Conclusion,' a very noble hymn, in which the liberation of the earth is celebrated.

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After leaving London he returned to Ambleside, and undertook the management of the school left vacant by the retirement of his old friend, Mr. Dawes. After four painful years of trial, this mode of life was given up. He had not expected much from it, and writes, I had a presentiment that it would never "do, and therefore your commendations seemed like reproaches put out to interest. . . . . How could I endure to be among unruly boys from seven in the morning till eight or nine at night, to be responsible for actions which I could no more 'control than I could move a pyramid?' From Ambleside he removed to Grasmere, where, as usual, he won all hearts.' His exquisite appreciation of Nature, as well as the habitual poetry with which he extracted a moral meaning from her face and gestures (for to him Nature was a friend; and his days were spent, not in admiration of her only, but in converse with her,)

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1851.

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His Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire.'

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are denoted by many a passage in his letters, not less poetical than his best poetry. He writes thus in July, 1830:

'And now the day of rest draws to a close. The weather has kept the Sabbath. The morning was the very perfection of stillness. No gay sunshine, no clamorous wind, no drudging rain; the sky wore one grey sober veil, and the mist hung upon the hills as if it paused. on its journey; the vapours were gathered up; no light detachments foraged along the mountain sides, to catch the flying sunbeams; but the thick masses formed an even line, like an army drawn up for a decisive engagement, and only halting till the truce of God was past; they divided the mountains as it were in half, concealing the higher moiety, and leaving the lower bulk distinct in dark, damp, solemn visibility. The vale was clad in deepest green, and fancifully resembled the face of one that is calm and patient after long weeping. The few patches of hay, gathered into round cocks, appeared to solicit the prayers of the congregation. All was quiet, pensive, not sad; only the young damsels in their fresh and fragrant garments (such, Í mean, as did not think it necessary to look like death, because a man whom they cared nothing about was gone, let us hope, to heaven) tripping along the fields and green lanes, and picking their way in moist high roads, glanced by like living sunbeams, and made their bright blue and pink ribbons dance like things of life.'

And again: :

The rain has fallen like a blessing on herb, and tree, and flower. The fields, the hills, the lake, so fickle yet so constant in its commingling transitions from light to shade, were possessed in the unity of peaceful gladness, now rejoicing in the soft yellow sunbeams, now pensive not sad, as the clouds floated leisurely along the sky. The birds who love in their seasons, and know not the collapse of despair, nor the fighting chaos of jealousy, nor the shame, the uneasy silence, the self-condemned yet cherished longing of forbidden hope, sang as if there were no evil on earth.' (Vol. i. p. 170.)

In the year 1832 he removed to Leeds, having contracted an engagement with a young publisher resident there, Mr. Bingley, to furnish materials for a volume of poetry and another of prose. To this arrangement we owe the first series of his poems, and also his Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire.' The latter work, consisting of thirteen lives, and filling a large octavo volume of 632 pages, came out originally in numbers, and having been completed in about a year, indicates on the part of its author no small power of continuous application under favourable circumstances. It is written with much vigour and eloquence, abounding in picturesque descriptions of events, as well as a dramatic delineation of character, and is enriched with many acute remarks and original trains of thought. During the course of the next year Mr. Bingley unfortunately became a bankrupt,

and the engagement was broken off. In the year 1834 Hartley lost his father. The following extract from a letter, written on that occasion, shows how keenly he felt the wound, and how deep a seat the affections occupied in his heart:

'It was his wish that he might so meet death as to testify the depth and sincerity of his faith in Jesus. And was he not, while life and breath were granted him, a powerful preacher of Jesus? For myself I can speak that he, he only, made me a Christian. What with my irregular passions, and my intellect powerful perhaps in parts, but ever like "a crazy old church clock with its bewildered "chimes"-what, but for him, I might have been I tremble to think. But I never forgot him. No, Derwent, I have forgot myself too often, but I never forgot my father. And now if his beatified spirit be permitted to peruse the day-book of the recording angel, to contemplate the memory of God which forgets nothing, in which the very abortions of time, the thoughts which we think we never thought, the meanings which we never meant to mean, live everlastingly; if he may look in that book, or rather, if an intimate knowledge of its contents be consubstantiated with the essence of his beatitude, then will he know that among my many sins it was not one that I loved him not; and wherever the final bolt of judgment may drive me, it will not be into the frozen regions of sons that loved not their fathers.' (Vol. i. p. 111.)

That reverential, and even remorseful, tenderness of affection which constituted so important an element in Hartley Coleridge's character is beautifully revealed in the following sonnet also:

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'Oh! my dear mother, art thou still awake?
Or art thou sleeping on thy Maker's arm,
Waiting in slumber for the shrill alarm
Ordained to give the world its final shake?
Art thou with "interlunar night" opaque
Clad like a worm while waiting for its wings;
Or doth the shadow of departed things
Dwell on thy soul as on a breezeless lake?
Oh! would that I could see thee in thy heaven
For one brief hour, and know I was forgiven
For all the pain, and doubt, and rankling shame
Which I have caused to make thee weep or sigh.
Bootless the wish! for where thou art on high,
Sin casts no shadow, sorrow hath no name.'

(1845.)

The latter years of his life glided away almost without incident. They were spent in the Nab Cottage,' on the banks of Rydal Water; the lake, with its two woody islands, lying before his windows, at a stone's throw from the door. In this humble abode he mused, meditated, studied, filled with marginal anno

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