Esq., M.A., F.S.A., &c., &c. In two volumes. Published by
Bentley.

From the Examiner.

HARTLEY COLERIDGE AND HIS GENIUS.

Hartley Coleridge was a poet whose life was so deplorable a
contradiction to the strength and subtlety of his genius, and the
capability and range of his intellect, that perhaps no such sad example
has ever found similar record.[J] Indeed we are obliged with sincere
grief to doubt, whether, as written here, the memoir should have been
written at all. With much respect for Mr. Derwent Coleridge, who is
himself no unworthy inheritor of a great name, his white neckcloth is
somewhat too prominently seen in the matter. There are too many labored
explainings, starched apologies, and painful accountings for this and
that. The writer was probably not conscious of the effort he was making,
yet the effort is but too manifest, A simple statement of facts, a
kindly allowance for circumstances, a mindful recollection of what his
father was in physical as well as mental organization, extracts from
Hartley's own letters, recollections of those among whom his latter life
was passed--this, as it seems to us, should have sufficed. Mr. Derwent
Coleridge brings too many church-bred and town-bred notions to the grave
design of moralizing and philosophizing his brother's simple life and
wayward self-indulgences. His motives will be respected, and his real
kindness not misunderstood; but it will be felt that a quiet and
unaffected little memoir of that strange and sorry career, and of those
noble nor wholly wasted powers, remains still to be written.

Meanwhile we gratefully accept the volumes before us, which in their
contents are quite as decisive of Hartley Coleridge's genius as of what
it might have achieved in happier circumstances. A more beautiful or
more sorrowful book has not been published in our day.

"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man."

Hartley Coleridge was the eldest son of the poet, and with much of his
father's genius (which in him, however, took a more simple and practical
shape than consisted with the wider and more mystical expanse of his
father's mind), inherited also the defects of his organization and
temperament. What would have become of the elder Coleridge but for the
friends in whose home his later years found a refuge, no one can say.
With no such friends or home, poor