organic strength to her husband, Mrs. Coleridge hazards a somewhat bold comparison: 'I may venture to say,' she writes, comparing little things with great, that this want of unity, exhibited in a somewhat different way, is also perceptible in "Faust." There the prevailing thought at the outset is quite merged in another, which arises adventitiously out of the progress of the story.' She considers her own production to belong to that class of fictions of which Robinson Crusoe,' Peter Wilkins,' 'Faust,' Undine,' Peter Schlemihl,' and the Magic Ring, or the 'White Cat,' and many other tales are instances; fictions in which it is not the author's chief object to inculcate a direct moral, but rather to please the imagination while dealing halfallegorically with the passions and interests of human life. While her father lived on at Highgate, and Sara with her husband and mother had her home in the lower part of Hampstead Heath, visits were exchanged between the houses. Henry Coleridge was a frequent attendant at his uncle's conversational réunions, and made it his business to record them for future use. In the summer of 1834 the poet died. The circumstances of his death are thus narrated by his daughter in a letter to a friend : His departure, after all, seemed to come suddenly upon us. We were first informed of his danger on Sunday, the 20th of July; and on Friday, the 25th, he was taken from us. For several days after fatal symptoms appeared his pains were very great; they were chiefly in the region of the bowels, but were at last subdued by means of laudanum, administered in different ways; and for the last thirty-six hours of his existence he did not suffer severely. When he knew that his time was come, he said that he hoped by the manner of his death to testify the sincerity of his faith; and hoped that all who had heard of his name would know that he died in that of the English Church. Henry saw him for the last time on Sunday, and conveyed his blessing to my mother and myself; but we made no attempt to see him, and my brothers were not sent for, because the medical man apprehended that the agitation of such interviews would be more than he ought to encounter. Not many hours before his death he was raised in his bed, and wrote a precious faintly-scrawled scrap, which we shall ever preserve, recommending his faithful nurse, Harriet, to the care of his family. Mr. Green, who had so long been the partner of his literary labours, was with him at the last, and to him, on the last evening of his life, he repeated a certain part of his religious philosophy, which he was especially anxious to have accurately recorded. He articulated with the utmost difficulty; but his mind was clear and powerful, and so continued till he fell into a state of coma, which lasted till he ceased to breathe, about six o'clock in the morning. His body was opened, according to his own earnest request. The causes of his death were sufficiently manifest in the state of the vital parts; but that internal pain, from which he suffered more or less during his whole life, was not to be explained, or only by that which medical men call nervous sympathy. A few out of his many deeply attached and revering friends attended his remains to the grave, together with my husband and Edward; and that body which did him such "grievous wrong was laid in its final resting-place in Highgate churchyard. His executor, Mr. Green, after the ceremony, read aloud his will, and was greatly overcome in performing his task. It is indeed a most affecting document. What little he had to bequeath (a policy of assurance worth about 2,5607.) is my mother's for life, of course, and will come to her children equally after her time. . . . No man has been more deeply beloved than my dear father; the servants at the Grove wept for him as for a father; and Mr. and Mrs. Gillman speak of their loss as the heaviest trial that has ever befallen them, though they have had their full share of sorrow and suffering.' The death of this eminent man gave a decided turn thenceforth to the literary occupations of his daughter and his sonin-law. Kindred offices to those performed by Lockhart for Walter Scott, and by John Warter for Southey, devolved upon Henry Nelson Coleridge in connexion with the father of his wife; and in his work as editor of the poet's literary miscellanea he found a zealous helpmate in Sara during his lifetime, as she proved also an efficient substitute when death at an early age cut short his own career of intelligent activity. That event took place in January, 1843, after a long illness from spinal paralysis, the ultimate development of those symptoms-presumed then to have been of a rheumatic nature-for which he undertook his West Indian visit in 1825. Sara, left a widow at the age of forty, mourned deeply the husband of her youth, but found support in her mental resources, her maternal duties, and in her religious convictions. A few days after her husband's death she writes to Mrs. Gillman: 'It was at Highgate, at your house, that I first saw my beloved Henry. Since then-now twenty years ago-no two beings could be more intimately united in heart and thoughts than we have been, or could have been more intermingled with each other in daily and hourly life. He concerned himself in all my feminine domestic occupations, and admitted me into close intercourse with him in all his higher spiritual and intellectual life. It has pleased God to dissolve this close tie, to cut it gradually and painfully asunder, and yet, till the last fatal stroke, to draw it even closer in some respects than before.' To another friend she writes: 'The separation is a fearful wrench from one for whom, and in expectation of whose smile, I might almost say, I have done all things, even to the choice of the least articles of my wearing apparel, for twenty years. But even that is not the heaviest side of the dispensation. It is to feel not merely that he is taken from me, but that, as appears, though it is but in appearance, he is not. That the sun rises in the morning, and he does not see it. The higher and better and enduring mind within us has no concern with these sensations, but they will arise, and have a certain force. While we remain in the tabernacle of the flesh, they are the miserable, cloggy vapours that from time to time keep steaming up from the floor and the walls, and obscure the prospect of the clear empyrean which may be seen from the windows. The most effective relief from them which I have found, is the reminding myself that he who is past from my sight is gone whither I myself look to go in a few years (not to mention all those of whom the world was not worthy, before the publication of the Gospel, and since); and that if I can contemplate my own removal, not with mere calmness, but with a cheerfulness which no other thought bestows, why should I feel sad that he is there before me? But these of which I have spoken are only the sensations of the natural man and woman. I well know that in my heart of hearts and better mind, that if he is not now in the Bosom of God, who is not the God of the dead, but of the living, or if all these hopes are but dreams, I can have but little wish to bring him back to earth again, or to care about anything, either in earth or heaven.' Later on her mind grew calmer. Thus she writes in October 13, 1843:— 'Of course I am not up to the mark of easy, quiet enjoyment; yet I feel that, for a time, it is good for me to be here. I cannot withdraw myself from the world; I must live on in this outward scene (though it continually seems most strange to my feelings that I should yet be mixed up in it and Henry gone from it for ever). But since I have been doomed to outlive my husband, I must, for my children's sake as well as my own, endeavour to enter, with as much spirit as I can, into the interests and movements of the sphere to which it is God's will that I should yet belong. Ever since my widowhood I have cultivated cheerfulness as I never did before. During my time of union I possessed happiness; mere cheerfulness I looked upon as a weed, the natural wild produce of the soil, which must spring up of itself. Now I crave to see fine works of art, or the still more mind-occupying displays of Nature. I try to take an interest in the concerns of my friends, to enter into the controversies of the day, to become intimate with the mood of mind and character of various persons, who are nothing to me (I being nothing to them), except as studies; just as a lichen or a curious moss may be, only in a higher manner and degree. All this with an earnestness unfelt in former times. To a certain extent I find my account in this; my mind is restless, and rather full of desultory activity than, what is far better, concentred energy; but it does not stagnate. I do not brood miserably over my loss, or sink into an aimless, inert despondency: I have even an upper stratum of cheerfulness in my mind, more fixed than in my happy married days; but then it is only an upper stratum: beneath it, unmoved and unmodified, is the sense of my loss.' To our mind, those letters of Mrs. Coleridge which portray her personal sorrows and consolations are the most interesting of the collection. They are genuine, not pedantic; and if coloured by a somewhat monotonous strain of sentiment and speculation, still they are, in their degree, revelations of real feeling, real thought, on subjects the deep significance of which cannot be ignored by any thinking being, as life presses its experiences home. She thus describes the satisfaction which intellectual occupation afforded her :- 'Things of the mind and intellect give me intense pleasure; they delight and amuse me, as they are in themselves, independently of aught they can introduce me to instrumentally and they have gladdened me in another way, by bringing me into close communion with fine and deep minds. It has seemed a duty, for my children's sake and my own, to cultivate this source of cheerfulness; and sometimes, I think, the result has been too large, the harvest too abundant, of inward satisfaction. This is dangerous. How hardly shall the rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven! And these are the richest of earthly riches. They who use intellect as the means of gaining money or reputation, are drudges, poor slaves-though even they have often a high pleasure in the means, while they are pursuing an unsatisfactory end. But they who live in a busy, yet calm world of thought and poetry, though their powers may be far less than those of the others, may forget heaven, if sorrow and sickness, and symptoms of final decay, do not force them to look up and strive away from their little transitory heaven upon earth to that which is above. Bright, indeed, that little heaven continually is with light from the supernal one. But we may rest too content with those reflections, which must fade as our mortal frame loses power. Hope of a higher existence can alone support us when this half-mental, half-bodily happiness declines.' In the education of her son Mrs. Coleridge found agreeable stimulus for her mental efforts. On their occasional visits to Margate and Herne Bay she watched with him the effects of sea and sky, comparing these with the descriptive notices of classical authors. When the Eton boy was at home for his holidays, she read Homer, Eschylus, Pindar, and Aristophanes with him. It is some exertion for me,' she says, writing in September, 1846, to keep pace with Herbert's Greek now; his eye is rapid, more so than mine ever was. I wish he could unite with this a little more of my pondering propensities, and love of digging down as far as ever one can go into the meaning of an author: though this is sometimes unfavourable to getting a given thing done for immediate use, it takes one off into such wide and many-branched excursions.' 6 But the intellectual labours to which she chiefly devoted herself were those which she undertook in connexion with the exposition of her father's works. Her husband's death threw upon her the responsibility of the edition which he had commenced. She was at that time already occupied with the composition of an elaborate essay on Rationalism, which appeared as Appendix C.' to the new edition of the Aids to Reflection put forth in 1843, and had reference primarily to the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, purporting to advocate what she conceived to be Coleridge's views of that doctrine in opposition to the high Sacramental tenets of the Tractarian school. The amount of sustained thought and reading which the essay displayed was certainly something unusual as exemplified in a female theologian. Not only the standard authorities of the English Church-Taylor, Waterland, South, and numerous others, were cited and analysed, but Greek and Latin fathers and German metaphysicians were passed under review. And yet this notable production failed in method and conciseness of statement, and in assimilative power. When the first surprise of the public was over, that a woman could have written so well and so learnedly, it was felt that no definite gain to theo logical controversy had been made. Besides this treatise, Mrs. Coleridge, in the course of her editorial labours, composed an Introduction' to her father's Biographia Literaria,' and a preface to the Essays on his own Times. She continued her occupation with his works up to the closing period of her own life, resigning it by degrees however, and at last wholly, into the hands of her brother, Derwent. There is something very touching in the following lines in which she comments on her own labours: 'Father! no amaranths e'er shall wreathe my brow; The theological studies to which Sara Coleridge devoted herself, in fulfilment of her filial task, at first with, and then without, her husband's aid and superintendence, were not only congenial to her natural disposition, they fell in also with the tendencies of a social epoch in which controversial polemics formed a somewhat prominent feature. And here we are tempted to a digression. If discussion on topics doctrinal and ecclesiastical was much in vogue in English coteries during the second quarter of the present century, it was not by any |