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Poor Hartley should have lived to see this fair edition of his works—now comprising seven delightful post-octavos.
"I own," he once said or sung—
I own I like to see my works in print;
The page looks knowing, though there’s nothing in't.
To have read his own poems, essays, marginalia, and "Biographia Borealis" (that "gentle book with a blustering title," as Southey called it), in so compact and tasteful a series—thanks to Mr. Moxon's tact in publishing "form and pressure"—would have cheered that child-like, gracious heart of his, and made him go on his lonely way rejoicing. Living, he was comparatively unrecognised; deceased, he is honoured with many honours—as a light of the age, though not, perhaps, a burning and shining one—as a power of the age, though the potency was cribbed and confined by sorrowful conditions. His brother's manly and affectionate memoir, at once so discreet and candid in its "deliverances," has awakened in every feeling heart a true sympathy with Professor Wilson's exclamation: "Dear Hartley! Yes, ever dear to me!" And his own writings are so fully stored with attractive personal traits, and testify to so kindly and genial a nature, that we incline to appropriate Landor's benison on the departed Elia, that "cordial old man,"" and say, in spite of hyper-orthodoxy:
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth
In every utterance of that guileless soul!
Few are the spirits of the glorified
I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven.
Is it objected that this is being to Hartley's faults more than a little blind, and to his virtues very, very kind? So be it. A "gentle" reader will not press the objection; and others, ungentle ones, we are not careful to answer in this matter. Enough to quote to them the canon—possibly to their thinking a vulgar error—de mortuis nil nisi bonum: and as Hartley Coleridge is not the man to be dismissed with a nil, let them not grudge the bonum we bestow, nor cavil at our interpretation of the rule nisi. In the year 1832, Hartley entered into an engagement, his brother tells us, with a printer and publisher at Leeds, to furnish matter for a provincial biography, to be entitled "The Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire," which, however, only proceeded as far as the third number. But as each life was complete in itself, and had an interest independent of mere local associations, the portion which had appeared was reprinted under the title of "Biographia Borealis." After a lapse of twenty years the same work re-appears, enriched with annotations by the author's father and brother. Hartley's intellect was, like his father's, prone to fragmentary, excursive, discursive moods; and there are those, we doubt not, who are disturbed by the influence of this peripatetic philosophy in a biogra-
- ↑ Lives of Northern Worthies. By Hartley Coleridge. Edited by his Brother. A New Edition, with the Corrections of the Author, and the Marginal Observations of S. T. Coleridge. 3 vols. Moxon, 1852.
