While reading Hartley Coleridge's life, we have been often grieved, but never for a moment have been tempted to anger. There is so much bonhomie, so much unaffected oddity, he is
such a queer being, such a character, in short, that you laugh more than you cry, and wonder more than you laugh. The judge would be a severe one who could keep his gravity while trying him. One mischief, too, which often attends faulty men of genius is wanting in him. He has not turned his "diseases into commodities"—paraded his vices as if they were virtues, nor sought to circulate their virus. He is, as the old divines were wont to say, a "sensible sinner," and lies so prostrate that none will have the heart to trample on him. His vices, too, were so peculiarly interwoven with his idiosyncrasy, which was to the last degree peculiar, that they can find no imitators. When vice seems ludicrous and contemptible, few follow it; it is only when covered with the gauzy vail of sentimentalism, or when deliberately used as a foil to set off brilliant powers, that it exerts an attraction dangerously compounded of its native charm, and the splendors which shine beside it. Men who are disposed to copy the sins of a gifted, popular, and noble poet like Byron, and who, gazing at his sun-like beams, absorb his spots into their darkened and swimming eyes, can only look with mockery, pity, and avoidance upon the slips of an odd little man, driveling amid the hedgerows and ditches of the lake country, even although his accomplishments were great, his genius undoubted, and his name Coleridge.
His nature was, indeed, intensely singular. One might fancy him extracted from his father's side, while he slept, and dreamed. He was like an embodied dream of that mighty wizard. He had not the breadth, the length, or the height of S. T. Coleridge's mind, but he had much of his subtlety, his learning, his occasional sweetness, and his tremulous tenderness. He was never, and yet always a child. The precocity he displayed was amazing—and precocious, and nothing more, he continued to the end. His life was a perpetual promise to be—a rich unexpanded bud—while his father's was a perpetual promise to do—a flower without adequate fruit. It was no wonder that when the father first saw his child his far-stretching eye was clouded with sorrow as he thought, "If I—a whole, such as has seldom been created, have had difficulty in standing alone, how can this be part of myself? If a frail tendency, running across my being, has damaged me, what is to become of one whose name is Frailty?" Some such thought was apparently in his prophetic mind when he wrote the sonnet beginning with
"Charles, my slow heart was only sad," &c.
Nor did the future history of the child belie the augury of this poetic sigh of a fond, yet fearing parent, over the extracted, embodied frailty and fineness of his own being.
Indeed, a circle of evil auguries surrounded the childhood of little Hartley. The calm, quiet eye of Wordsworth surveyed the sports of the child, and finding them those of no common infant, he wrote the poem to "H. C., six years old," where he says—
"Thou art a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Ill-fitted to sustain unkindly shocks,
Or to be trailed along the soiling earth."
His power of youthful fancy and language was wonderful. Not even Scott's story-telling faculty was equal to his. He delighted in recounting to his brother and companions, not a series of tales, but "one continuous tale, regularly evolved, and possessing a real unity, enchaining the attention of his auditors for a space of years." "This enormous romance, far exceeding in length the compositions of Calprenede, Scudery, or Richardson, though delivered without premeditation, had a progressive story with many turns and complications, with salient points recurring at intervals, with a suspended interest varying in intensity, and occasionally wrought up to a very high pitch, and at length a final catastrophe and conclusion." While constructing this he was little more than twelve years of age.
A curiosity, Hartley Coleridge commenced life by being—and a curiosity, somewhat battered and soiled, he continued to the end. His peculiarity lay in such a combination of wonderful powers and wonderful weaknesses, of the mind of a man, the heart of a child, and the body of a dwarf, of purposes proud and high, and habits mean and low—as has seldom been witnessed. The wild disorganization produced by such a medley of contradictory qualities, no discipline, no fortunate conjuncture of circumstances, nothing, perhaps, but death or miracle could have reconciled. He was not deranged—but he was disarranged in the most extraordinary degree. And such dark disarrangements are sometimes more hopeless than madness itself. There is nothing for them but that they be taken down, and cast into the new mould of the grave.