COLERIDGE, HARTLEY An English poet, born at Clevedon, Somersetshire, the eldest son of S. T. Coleridge. He studied at Oxford, and was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, from which he was removed by the authorities in 1826 on the charge of intemper ance. For two years he resided in London. Then he returned to the Lake Country. and after hay ing twice attempted school-teaching, first pri vately at Ambleside, and later at the grammar school of Sedbcrgh as an assistant in 1837 and 1838, settled at Grasmere. An almost constant wanderer about the vales, this diminutive figure, prematurely gray and old, became familiar to the peasantry as 'Little Hartley.' He was a scholar of rare attainment, a poet of exquisite taste and easy felicity, to whom, in the words of Bowden, "good thoughts came as of free grace." But lacking will and the capacity for sustained application, he remained despondent. fragmentary, ineffectual. His longest literary work was in the preparation of an edition of the dramas of Ma ssinger and Ford, with biographies of those authors (1540). He also wrote a series
of lives of the Worthies of Yorkshire and Lan cshire (1S36; originally as Biographic Bore alis, ] 533) . He is best known, however, for his verse, which, if it distinctly lacks to power, is singularly fine in mood and happy in expres sion. Of the sonnet, a form, as Dr. Garnett observes. precisely suited both his strength and his limitations," he composed some of the finest examples in English. Such are "Whither." "To Shakespeare." "Prayer." 1840." "Regrets," and "Ideality." His brother, Derwent. edited four volumes of his literary re mains (two volumes of poetry and two of pro,o. London, I851). Selections are to be found in all important anthologies. Hartley Coleridge was, his life long, a friend of whose 'To H. C.: Six Years Old," :eenis strangely prophetic.