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and the effect was to shut me out from the knowledge, by conversation, of almost any part of her mind and nature, except her intellect. For whenever she was shy, if she could not be silent, which was impossible when we were alone together, she fled into the region where she was most at home and at ease, which was that of psychology and abstract thought and this was the region where I was by no means at ease and at home. Had we met more frequently (and I never cease to wish that we had) no doubt these little difficulties would soon have been surmounted; and we should have got into the fields of thought and sentiment which had an interest common to us both. But I was a busy man in these years, and not equal in health and strength to what I had to do and it was in vain for me to seek her society, when I was too tired to enjoy it: and then came her illness and her early death, and she had passed away before I had attained to know her in her inner mind and life. I only know that the admirable strength and subtlety of her reasoning faculty shown in her writings and conversations, were less to me than the beauty and simplicity and feminine tenderness of her face; and that one or two casual and transitory expressions of her nature in her countenance, delightful in their poetic power, have come back to me from time to time, and that they are present with me now, when much of what was most to be admired in her intellectual achievements or discourse have passed into somewhat of a dim distance.'

To the classical glorification of the fair Sara in her maiden days, contained in Wordsworth's poem of The Triad,' we shall, for the sake of space, content ourselves with making reference only, as the poem itself is easily accessible to most readers:'Last of the three, though eldest born,

Reveal thyself like pensive Morn,' &c.

Sara herself never professed to admire the poem. In one of her letters she says:

'It is, to my mind, artificial and unreal. There is no truth in it as a whole; although bits of truth, glazed and magnified, are embodied in it, as in the lines,

"Features to old ideal grace allied,"

a most unintelligible allusion to a likeness discerned in dear Dora's contour of countenance to the great Memnon head in the British Museum, with its overflowing lips and width of mouth, which seems to be typical of the Ocean. The poem always strikes me as a mongrel -an amphibious thing, neither portrait nor ideal, but an ambiguous cross between the two. Mr. de Vere, before he knew me, took it for a personification of Faith, Hope, and Charity, taken in inverse order— a sufficient proof, I think, that it is extravagant and unnatural as a description of three young ladies of the nineteenth century.'

In the lines,

'Come with each anxious hope subdued
By woman's gentle fortitude,'

In 1823

an allusion is contained to the most interesting event in the young maiden's life, her engagement to her young lawyercousin. Of the many accomplished members of the Coleridge family, Henry Nelson Coleridge is one well entitled to remembrance for his own sake. He was a younger son of Colonel James Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary, and a brother of Sir John Taylor Coleridge, lately a member of our judicial bench, the friend and biographer of Keble. Henry was educated at Eton and Cambridge; was a Fellow of King's College, and obtained the Browne medal in two successive years. he was a contributor, in conjunction with Winthrop Praed, Macaulay, Sidney Walker, and Moultrie, to Knight's Quarterly Magazine; his own essays being chiefly on historical subjects. He made the legal profession his choice; and while studying in London he visited assiduously his philosophic uncle on the Highgate heights, became enraptured with his converse, and eventually set himself to Boswellise' it in the vivid but fragmentary record which was published after the great man's death as the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge.'

The

Henry

6

In 1822 the subject of the present biography visited her father at Highgate, and there met for the first time her accomplished, animated cousin. The attachment that sprang up on both sides led to their marriage seven years afterwards. interval was a period of somewhat anxious suspense. Coleridge had to secure his position at the Chancery Bar; and the interruption of a period of ill-health, for which he undertook a six months' sojourn in the West Indies in 1825, came inopportunely to throw him back. But his ready talent, acquired knowledge, constitutional high spirits and ardent love, carried him through adverse circumstances. His account of his West Indian experiences, published under the title of Six 'Months in the West Indies,' was a popular book in its day, and struck the public ear with something of novelty because of its mercurial style--that mixture of the graphic, sentimental and jocose, which is common enough now as a style, but which rarely characterised books of travel fifty years ago, when the visiting foreign climes was still a serious proceeding. Mr. Trollope himself could not write with more fun of the West Indian coloured beauties, their dances and their graces, nor portray in more lively terms the habits of life of the planters. Of the descriptive powers evinced in this almost forgotten book, we may cite at random two instances: that of a storm in the Bay of Biscay, and the first view of Trinidad. Throughout the young exile's lively pages breathes his loyalty to his far-off love, his Eugenia,' to whom he declares himself to

belong in union or separation' to his life's end-whose image accompanies him in visions by night, in musings by day, in 'noise and in silence, in crowds and in the wilderness,' associated with the lake, the mountain, the cousin-star of beauty [Edith Southey], twin divinities of Vallombrosa.'

Henry and Sara Coleridge were married at Crossthwaite Church near Keswick, on Sept. 3, 1829.

'After a few months spent in a London lodging,' says her daughter, 'they began their frugal housekeeping in a tiny cottage on Downshire Hill, Hampstead, where their four elder children were born, of whom the twins, Berkeley and Florence, died in infancy. In 1837 my parents removed to a more commodious dwelling in Chester Place, Regent's Park, where a third daughter, Bertha Fanny, was born in 1840, who survived her birth but a few days.'

United not only by affection, but by the closest similarity of tastes, the young couple cultivated literature in common. The year after his marriage the husband published his popular Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets,' which reached a second edition in 1834. The letters of the wife to him at this time afford presumptive evidence that she was an intelligent critic, possibly an assistant, of his labours. We find her thus commenting on the observation of Nature by the ancients :

'Martin says the ancients were vague in the description of colours. I doubt not, if we understood them thoroughly, we should find that what appears vague and shadowy proceeded from fineness and accuracy of discernment. The ancients were precise in the delineation of Nature. They did not see it with the spirit of Wordsworth-no more, I think, did Shakspeare. But they either drew and coloured in the -open air, and conveyed forms and tints closely and vividly, or they translated literally from the poets who did so, as Virgil appears to have done from Homer and Theocritus. This applies to their poetical diction. The spirit and form of Virgil's work were doubtless borrowed with modification; but the vague, dreamy imagery of Shelley, Keats, &c., I believe to be a thing of modern growth. The ancients did not modify and compose out of floating reminiscences of other books. Purpureus, as applied to a swan, of course is metaphorical, red being the most brilliant of colours, and a white swan gleaming in full daylight one of the most resplendent of natural objects. The passages on the hyacinth, I think, are perfectly consistent, if closely examined, and express a peculiar shade of red, belonging to one of the multitudinous tribe of lilies. Glaucus, too, has a precise meaning. Pallens is very expressive and true in the way it is applied-meaning yellowish white. Niger must have meant dark-coloured, not merely black. How exact the metaphors of the peasantry are. The "Georgics" is the Rubens portrait of Nature."

'There can be no doubt that Cicero had a feeling of the interest to

be derived from a copy of living objects on canvas, or even those of still life, as the scene and circumstance of action. But the picturesqueness of the group may not have been the source of interest (at least not to the consciousness of the beholder, though no doubt it did enhance the gratification), but the life portrayed in the picture. The beholder was to be instructed, animated, or soothed by the story of some event, or knowledge of some fact, rather than astonished, gratified, entertained by the exhibition of art, and spectacle of abstract beauty. I think this is the general distinction between the ancient and modern notions in regard to painting, though there may be exceptions, and the times of old may have had an infusion of our feelings, as we doubtless partake of that sort of interest which was the chief and most defined one to them. The pleasure to be derived from the power of art was by no means so decidedly modern, as a sense of the picturesqueness of inanimate combinations. The latter must belong to a people who have long been refined; a people who have leisure to luxuriate in things which have no being but in the imagination, and who have hit upon combinations and notions of the agreeable and beautiful which were never suggested to the fancy even of sages and philosophers of simpler ages. Don't you think that much of the best modern poetry would be unintelligible to Cicero ?'

Learned letters, to be addressed by a wife to a husbandpossibly, it may be said, savouring of pedantry. But if they evince little more than the faculty of reproducing the results of reading, and are, as commentaries, rather trite than original, it must be remembered that they were merely passing notices, never meant for publication. Never meant for publication:' this indeed is a phrase very commonly used, and, we suppose, applicable to almost all letters whose writers have not reached the highest terraces of fame. Were they meant for preservation? Undoubtedly. In her private circle Sara Coleridge stood on a pedestal. She was greatly admired for her intellectual attainments. Her friends made a point of preserving her letters; and they are letters that naturally would be preserved. They are cultivated and thoughtful productions, but they cannot be called vigorous or sparkling. In her correspondence, which, with the exception of the occasional letters to her husband and those of later date to Mr. de Vere, is chiefly carried on with female friends, we look in vain for any varied descriptions of character or society. Her nature prevented her from being a lively narrator. She was essentially one of die Stillen im Lande. Her mind was of the introspective cast. Delicate health, fragile nerves, the secluded training of her youth, and the absence during that impressible period of the home joys that should have been specially her own, had thrown a shade of pensiveness over her disposition which the affectionate atmosphere of her married life mellowed into

happiness indeed, but not into vivacity. Moreover, the life of the young wife and mother was in itself quiet and uneventful. Circumstances kept her very much to her own fireside. She seems seldom to have quitted Chester Place, except for brief holiday sojourns at the watering-places on the Kentish coast. Once only, during her husband's illness, she made a short tour abroad with him. To read and ponder was her favourite recreation: to instruct her children, a duty to which she lovingly devoted herself. Many of her letters are taken up with describing her mode of educating her son, whose Greek and Latin studies led her along the classical pathways so congenial to her taste. A little volume, entitled 'Pretty Lessons for Good Children,' which her husband persuaded her to publish in 1834, perpetuated some of her early teachings, and proved a popular work, passing through five editions. Her daughter cites, with loving allusion to the subsequent character and career of the brother for whom they were composed, these lines, suggested by one of the Latin declensions :

Learning, Herbert, hath the features
Almost of an angel's face:

Contemplate them steadfastly,

Learn by heart each speaking grace.
Truth and wisdom, high-wrought fancy,

In those lineaments we trace;

Never be your eyes averted

Long from that resplendent face!'

Less successful as a literary venture than the Pretty Les'sons,' was a Fairy Tale, entitled Phantasmion,' which Mrs. Coleridge published in 1837. In spite of the favourable judgment of an American critic, cited by the editor of these volumes, who declares that nothing comparable to Phantas'mion' had appeared since the 'Undine' of La Motte Fouqué, we must admit that in our opinion the indifference with which this tale was received by the general public had sufficient grounds. The graceful fantasies which undoubtedly spring up among the elves of wood and wind and water, by whom the pages of Phantasmion' are peopled, fail to allure the reader through a maze of dreary incidents and artificial personalities. We care not for the visionary vicissitudes of Palmland and Tigridia, nor for the pulseless loves or woes of Anthemmida and Iarine; and even the bits of musical verse with which the romance is interspersed, obtain no grasp on the memory by point or felicity of diction. The story has no backbone: no definite plan or purpose. In justifying its want of

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