d some other books, and supported himself (with the curious
Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without
either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made
his prospects secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before
Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother
Derwent in seven small volumes; the _Poems_ filling two, the _Essays and
Fragments_ two, and the _Biographia Borealis_ three.

This last (which appeared in its second form as _Lives of Northern
Worthies_, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an
excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable
circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it
is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of _Poems_ and
_Essays_. In the former Hartley has no kind of _souffle_ (or
long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches
of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level
with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular
melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special
home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the
sound--not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music--is
unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than
the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"),
and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. Many of the
miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the
greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one
of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who
has been very frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of
poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is
wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called
originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not
singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the
notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they
are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare
them.

It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great
poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little
kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction
to Massinger and Ford, and his _Marginalia_, suff