Coleridge, HARTLEY, eldest son of the great Coleridge, was born, an eight months' child, at Clevedon, Somersetshire, 19th September 1796. Very early he showed uncommon parts, and a singular power of living entirely in a make-believe world of dreams and imagination. Wordsworth's lovely and touching poem to the child at six years of age was strangely and sadly prophetic of his after-life; hardly less the concluding lines of his own father's two poems, The Nightingale and Frost at Midnight. Hartley was brought up, after the separation of his parents, by Southey at Greta Hall, and was educated chiefly at Ambleside school. In 1815 he went to Oxford as postmaster of Merton College. His scholarship was great but unequal, and not such as to lead to high distinc- tions in the schools. His failure after no less than three attempts to gain the Newdigate filled him with 'a passionate despondency,' from which he turned for relief to a fatal remedy. When at length he had gained with credit an Oriel fellowship, at the close of his probationary year he was judged to have forfeited it mainly on the ground of intemperance. 'The sentence might be considered severe,' says his brother; 'it could not be said to be unjust.' Unhappily it ruined his life, crushed his spirit, and made recovery impossible. With £300 given him by the college, Hartley spent the next two years in London, then tried for four or five years taking pupils at Ambleside, occasionally writing for Blackwood's Magazine, next lived some time at Grasmere, and then went to live at Leeds with one Bingley, a publisher, for whom he agreed to write a biographical work on the worthies of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Of these but thirteen lives had already been written when Bingley failed. These were published under the titles of Biographia Borealis (1833) and of Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire (1836). Bingley also printed a small volume of his poems in 1833. Hartley next returned to Grasmere, the only remaining interruptions to his ordinary life being two short and not unsuccessful intervals of teaching at Sedbergh grammar-school. His father, who died in 1834, made a special provision for him in a codicil to his will, and his mother's death in 1845 made him by an annuity completely independent. He continued to write poetry, and wrote a life of Massinger for an edition projected by Moxon. His days were spent in fitful study, lonely reverie, and wanderings over the Lake Country, with, unhappily, occasional lapses into intemperance. The dalesmen everywhere treated 'Poet Hartley' with a singularly affectionate respect, not without a kind of awe at his ecerie appearance, his abstracted air, his small stature, prematurely white hair, and gentle manners. He loved children and animals, and was fondly loved by them in return. He died 6th January 1849, and was buried beside what was soon to be Wordsworth's grave.
Hartley Coleridge's poetry falls short of the great, but sometimes approaches it, and even nearly. It is graceful, tender, and sincere, pervaded throughout with a charm of a nature rare and almost unique, alternately wise and playful, and often perfect in the expression of the thoughts it has to convey. He is greatest in the sonnet—a form which seems exactly to have been the measure of his powers, or rather of the fitful periods of his poetic passion. Leonard and Susan, a narrative poem in blank verse, and Prometheus, a dramatic fragment, are the only poems of any length. His Poems were collected by his brother Derwent, with a Memoir (2 vols. 1851); also his Essays and Marginalia (2 vols. 1851).