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English Men of Letters: Coleridge by H. D. (Henry Duff) Traill
page 113 of 217 (52%)
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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