the root was an intense craving for sympathy, rendered anxious by a melancholy temperament, and exaggerated sense of his own peculiarities. This melancholy-of which, moody depression and extravagant hilarity, a humorous sadness and a humorous mirth, are but (as S. T. Coleridge would have said) opposite poles-was displayed before any outward event had occurred to excite, and to deepen it, sometimes, as we have seen, in obscure forebodings of evil to come,—more commonly in a fitful, whimsical, affectionate drollery, such was the form which it took in his loving nature,-which continued through life, and by which perhaps he will be most frequently remembered by his friends. But it is with the gloomy phase of this "humour" that I have now to speak. Among his puerilia I find the following lines, which may be taken as the expression of something more than a wilful fancy:

PRESENTIMENT.

SOMETHING has my heart to say,
Something on my breast does weigh,
That, when I would full fain be gay,
Still pulls me back.
Something evil does this load
Most assuredly forebode :

So my experience sadly show'd,

Too well I know.

Sometimes, as if with mocking guile,
The pain departs a little while;
Then I can dance, and sing, and smile
With merry glee.

But soon, too soon, it comes again—
The sulky, stifling, leaden pain,

As a black cloud is big with rain,
Is big with woe.

All I ask is but to know

The depth and nature of the woe;
hope not for a wind to blow
The cloud away.

I hear an inarticulate sound,
Wherein no fixéd sense is found,
But sorrow, sorrow without bound
Of when or where.

This temperament, with its strange alternations (of which old Burton, bringing the omne scibile to bear upon the subject, and melancholising the whole, has left so characteristic a picture, and be it remembered, it was a sad reality to him) constitutes "the humorist" in the true sense of the term, and produces, as an indispensable condition and co-efficient, all genuine humour, grave or gay, mirthful or pathetic. It is very marked in Shakspeare, in Swift, in Sterne, and in Cowper. It is traceable in Shenstone, in Johnson, in Southey, and still more in Charles Lamb. It is this which alone gives truth or meaning to the famous line,

"Great wit to madness sure is near allied."

In Hartley Coleridge it cannot, perhaps, be said to have overstepped the confines of sanity (indeed, between the extremes there lay an interspace of healthy cheerfulness and buoyant vigour), and yet, under all the circumstances, it may well account for, and palliate, if not wholly excuse, much of what followed-the sorrow and the regret of his after life.

But I must be more particular. This vanity, whether love of display, or craving for sympathy, took, in my brother, a specific direction. To stand well in the opinion of the other sex, was with him more than the ordinary ambition of youth; it allied itself to all the yearnings of a nature tender and affectionate in the extreme, but singularly impatient of control. Whatever put on the guise of authority —of stern authority-irritated and repelled him: hence he sought in woman, what he afterwards found in children, an object which he could love without restraint. Once or twice, perhaps oftener, this feeling centered on a particular object—at Oxford, and afterwards - "brief periods of dear delusion," which quickly vanished, for I believe he never made his wishes known; but, for the most part, it remained homeless and unclaimed, “going to and fro," or brooding in the air without a resting-place. This passion long rankled within him, supplying food to his peculiar melancholy,

after the hopes which it engendered were well nigh extinct. Many of his poems, some of them of extreme beauty, give expression to these feelings."

*

It was in this temper of mind that he went to the University. By his peculiar appearance and manners, he conceived himself precluded from winning the grace which he coveted. Shy and sensitive, and oppressed, as I have said, by a morbid and self-insulating consciousness of his own singularity, (which, however, could he have thought so, need have caused him no such un

*See, for instance, the sonnet, Vol. I.,

p. 35:

"What is young Passion but a gusty breeze?"

and in particular the song, p. 43:

"The earliest wish I ever knew

Was woman's kind regard to win;

I felt it long ere passion grew,
Ere such a wish could be a sin.

"And still it lasts; the yearning ache
No cure has found, no comfort known :
If she did love, 'twas for my sake;

She could not love me for her own."

As he said long afterwards :-"The hope, which with varying names still had one object, hath evanesced, perhaps, for ever, and I am content it should be so, for now I can love without hope, almost without wish. Yet no-I do wish, -I wish to be beloved, as I am sure I am not now. I wish that some one should love me, not for my own sake, but for her own that she should wish for my love, rejoice in it, take a pride in it. But that must not be."

easiness), he shrunk from the semblance of repulse. He trusted, however, that the éclat which he should obtain by his talents, and particularly as an acknowledged poet, would counterbalance these deficiencies. This hope was doomed to disappointment, at least for the purpose with which it was cherished, and at the time when he expected most eagerly and most confidently that it would have been fulfilled.

The prizes for composition in the Latin tongue were obviously out of my brother's reach. The skill which they are intended to encourage is seldom or never acquired by self-taught men; and my brother, over and above his want of schoolteaching, had been brought up with little respect for these exercises,-less respect, I think, than they deserve. But he wrote copies of English verse, each successive year, for the Newdigate prize, the subject of the first being the Horses of Lysippus.* He was unsuccessful on all three occasions, and was chagrined by his failures, more especially by the first, far more than the occasion

* "The Farnese Hercules" (see Essays) and "the Coliseum" were the subject of the other two. "In my own should-havebeen prize verses on the Coliseum," he says in one of his note-books, ". was this couplet

"Where yellow Tiber rolls his scanty wave,

Reflecting empires' wreck and glory's grave."