English Men of Letters: Coleridge by H. D. (Henry Duff) Traill
page 113 of 217 (52%)
page 113 of 217 (52%)
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We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved
Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in 1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's affections. Yet all these interwoven influences--a deep love of his children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he never ceased to speak with respect and regard--were as powerless as in so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty" (_i.e._ to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take |
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