Passing lightly over his 'Northern Worthies,' some dozen or so of biographic sketches, good and capable 'pot-boilers'—yet 'pot-boilers' essentially—one comes to his essays, written for Blackwood and other magazines and papers, and his marginalia written in his books and published after his death. We cannot but be struck with the immense variety of subjects dealt with in his essays. Many of them are signed by a pseudonym, such as 'Thersites' if on 'Heathen Mythology'—or 'Tom Thumb the Great' if 'Brief Observations upon Brevity'—or 'Ignoramus' if a series on the 'Fine Arts'—and very few were issued in his own name. Some are full of quaint humour, such as 'Thoughts on Horsemanship, by a Pedestrian,' 'A Nursery Lecture delivered by an Old Bachelor.' Others have a fine literary flavour, as, for example, 'Shakespeare, a Tory and a Gentleman,' or 'On the Character of Hamlet.' It is, however, as a sonnetteer he will be longest remembered, and as a writer of miscellaneous verses. When rowing round Grasmere Lake the other day we recalled his lines, beginning:
'Within the compass of a little vale
There lies a lake unknown in fairy tale,
Which not a poet knew in ancient days,
When all the world believed in ghosts and fays;
Yet on that lake I have beheld a boat
That seemed a fairy pinnace all afloat,
On some blest mission to a distant isle
To do meet worship in some ruined pile,
Where long of yore the Fairies used to meet
And haply hallow with their last retreat.'
Sometimes, too, when religious controversies grow warm around the good old revelation those verses of his come to remembrance, called 'The Word of God':
'In holy books we read how God hath spoken
To holy men in many different ways;
But hath the present work'd no sign or token?
Is God quite silent in these latter days?
'And hath our Heavenly Sire departed quite,
And left His poor babes in this world alone,
And only left for blind belief—not sight—
Some quaint old riddles in a tongue unknown?'
Hartley Coleridge's longer and more ambitious pieces do not commend themselves to the public as do his shorter ones. His forte was in—
'Singing of the little rills
That trickle down the yellow hills
To drive the Fairies' water-mills;'
of children whom he doted upon,—of 'the merry lark that bids a blithe good-morrow,'—of 'summer rain'—of 'rose, and violet, and pansy, each with its tale of love'—of poor Mary Magdalene. From his own soul, as from Mary's, it may be the Lord has 'wiped off the soiling of despair.' May we find it has been so when we ourselves reach the great hereafter.