Coleridge, SARA

Coleridge, SARA, the gifted daughter of the great Coleridge, was born, 23d December 1802, at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where she was brought up by Southey. Her 'depth of meditative eye' is noticed by Wordsworth in the finest lines of his rather poor poem, the Triad (1828), the other maidens of the group being Edith Southey and Dora Wordsworth. Sara early showed remarkable powers of mind, with all her father's leaning towards psychology and abstract thought. At twenty she published, to aid her brother Derwent's college expenses, a translation of Martin Dobrizhofer's Latin Account of the Abipones (1784), and three years later the 'Loyal Servitor's' memoirs of the Chevalier Bayard. In 1829 she married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and on his death in 1843 succeeded him in the task of annotating and editing her father's writings. Her health failed early, and she died 3d May 1852. Her own works were Pretty Lessons for Good Children (1834), and Phantasmion (1837), a somewhat remarkable fairy-tale. Her Memoirs and Letters were edited by her daughter in 1873.—Her son, HERBERT COLERIDGE, born in 1830, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, took a double-first in 1852, and was called to the bar, but devoted himself to the study of comparative philology. Elected a member of the Philological Society in 1857, he threw himself with enthusiasm into its ambitious project of a standard English dictionary, and was practically editor in its earlier stages. His own works were a Glossarial Index to the Printed English Literature of the Thirteenth Century (1859), and an excellent essay on King Arthur, printed after his untimely death (at London, 23d April 1861) by the Philological Society.