cation with the street and open air. A bird-cage of this sort, with which many houses were provided, was called a frame. The women sat in it, to sew and knit; the cook picked her salad there; female neighbors chatted with each other, and the streets, consequently, in the fine season, wore a southern aspect. The street passed by the name of the Stag-ditch; but as neither stags nor ditches were to be seen, we wished to have the expression explained. They told us that our home stood on a spot that was once outside the city, and that where the street now ran had formerly been a ditch in which a number of stags were kept. These stags were preserved and fed here, because the senate every year, according to an ancient custom, feasted publicly on a stag, which was, therefore, always at hand in the ditch for such a festival, in case princes or knights interfered with the city's right of chase outside, or the walls were encompassed or besieged by an enemy." Goethe also refers in his Autobiography to the childish horror with which he regarded the Jews and their quarter. "Among the things which excited the misgivings of the boy, and even of the truth, was especially the state of the Jewish quarter of the city, (Judenstadt,) properly called the Jew street, (Judengasse,) as it consisted of little more than a single street, which in early times may have been hemmed in between the walls and trenches of the town, as in a prison (Zwinger). The closeness, the filth, the crowd, the accent of an unpleasant language, altogether made a most disagreeable impression, even if one only looked in as one passed the gate. It was long before I ventured in alone, and I did not return there readily, when I had once escaped the importunities of so many men unwearied in demanding and offering to traffic. At the same time, the old legends of the cruelty of the Jews towards Christian children, which we have seen hideously illustrated in Godfrey's Chronicles, hovered gloomily before my young mind. And although they were thought better of in modern times, the huge caricature, still to be seen, to their disgrace, on an orchard wall under the bridge tower, bore extraordinary witness against them; for it had been made, not by private ill-will, but by public order." Doubtless, it takes many generations to root out a traditionary hatred between races of this kind, if indeed it can ever be thoroughly effaced.-Eliza Cook's Journal. CORRESPONDENCE. the government wants it,) there would be only fiftytwo receipts of money in a year, and no accounts need be kept with anybody. But this would be entirely too simple and easy an operation; so the PostmasterGeneral-in the spirit of the complicated, contradictory and troublesome provisions, by which, at his instigation, the Cheap Postage Law (which requires for its success uniformity and simplicity) has been deformed and burdened-the Postmaster-General, we say, has issued instructions, by which he requires each subscriber to prepay at his own office. makes it necessary to keep thousands of accounts over all parts of the United States, and causes to us and to you great additional trouble. This We think it but just to Mr. Hall to say that we do not yet believe that his object is to make the new law as troublesome and as little useful as possible, although his course looks very like it. Will you please to remember, that under the 1W law, as interpreted and (as we think) contradicted by Mr. Hall, the postage on each number of the Living Age to your office is cents, but that by prepaying quarterly in advance, you may have a reduction of one half? You have a receipt up to No. The No. which is issued to-day is 373, so that you have to prepay on Nos. cents. We have credited you with this additional sum, which carries your payment to No. inclusive. Please to remember that unless the payment is made in advance, and directly to us, (so as to save us the expense of commission,) we shall not be able to bear the expense of postage. We shall have much to say hereafter upon the arbitrary and unlawful instructions by which the Postmaster-General sets aside the definition of a newspaper given in the law itself, and refuses to carry the Living Age at newspaper postage. It may not be unnecessary, when so many new publications are starting at half our price, and boast ing of their cheapness, that we should say to our subscribers that the Living Age contains nearly, if not quite, double the quantity of matter of any of them. Besides, there is not one of the same character as the Living Age. Some are very good, so far as their plan COPY OF A CIRCULAR TO A PORTION OF OUR MAIL SUB- goes, and a great improvement upon the milliner SCRIBERS. OFFICE OF LITTELL'S LIVING AGE, DEAR SIR :-We write in an ill-humor this morning. From this day (on which the new Postage Law comes into operation) we intended to prepay, at the Boston Post Office, the whole of each week's publication, so far as the subscribers had paid in advance directly to our Office. But the Post Office Department will not allow us to do so, unless we pay double what the subscribers will have to pay if they prepay at their respective offices. If the department would take the money here, (where style of previous magazines; but the Living Age is the only work which contains what is needed by the statesman or professional man, by the merchant or the student, and by every man, indeed, who desires to keep up with the literature, science, and politics of the age we live in ;-combined with a full supply of lighter and more entertaining literature-so as to be attractive to families, and a welcome recreation to all readers. Hoping long to number you among our subscribers, and determined to deserve your good opinion, we are, Very respectfully, your servants, E. LITTELL & CO. The LIVING AGE is published every Saturday, by E. LITTELL & Co., at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets, Boston. Price 124 cents a number, or six dollars a year in advance. Remittances for any period will be thankfully received and promptly attended to. LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 375.-26 JULY, 1851. From Fraser's Magazine. * HARTLEY COLERIDGE AS MAN, POET, ESSAYIST. HARTLEY COLERIDGE was born on the 19th of September, 1796, at Clevedon, near Bristol, a little village which has a threefold claim upon the affection of all who love English poetry, that is, of true Englishmen, as the residence of the first and greatest Coleridge, the birthplace of his son, and, above all, as the final resting-place of him whose untimely death has been bewailed in the grandest and sweetest lament ever sung by poet over grave. There, too, but a few months back, were laid the remains of one who, rivalling his brother in great and good qualities, met like him an early death -one more example of hope blighted, of promise unfulfilled, one more manifestation of that mysterious Providence, whose ways baffle our ken, and leave nothing for the best and wisest of us, but, laden with cares and doubts, to fall suppliant Upon the great world's altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God. Our sorrow for the loss of those two noble brothers is deepened and doubled by the thought of what they might have been-but for inexorable fate. So it is with the subject of the memoir before What might he have been but for opportunities neglected, and gifts abused? Their sun went down 'ere noon; his sun struggled on through cloud and storm to eventide. We all know the us. Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds And again I deem it wise To make him Nature's playmate. A few years later, Wordsworth addressed to the child of his friend the tender and graceful verses beginning O thou! whose fancies from afar are brought; The breeze-like motion, and the self-born carol. I think of thee with many fears For what may be thy lot in future years. Nor did he want for hopes, and wishes, and prayers, couched in plain prose. Lamb over and over again sends his love-a love worth the sendhis father so to train him that he may be worthy of ing-to" dear, dear little Hartley ;" and exhorts his Christian name. In his childhood he was unlike other children, just as in his boyhood he was unlike other boys, and in his manhood unlike other men. His birth had been premature, hence came, in all probability, the weakness of his frame, and the smallness of his stature. Conscious of physical imperfection, he avoided the rough sports of children; conscious of singularity, he shrank from their ridicule, and was best pleased to wander like a breeze" alone proverb, nil mali de mortuis; a better and truer reading would be, nil falsi de mortuis. There has never been a life lived or written which did not contain ensamples to follow, and warnings to among the woods and fields, to be the playmate of avoid; and as it is our duty to the dead to set Nature, who ever treats her playmates gently and down naught in malice, so it is our duty to the lovingly. Such habits would, of course tend to living to extenuate nothing. We would fain develop the fancy unduly at the expense of the speak of the failings and short-comings of the more solid qualities; thus fostering what was perdeparted with all affection and all humility, affec-haps an innate defect. His mother used to tell, tion for him who has "dreed the bitter drole," and humility to think that we ourselves share the same nature, and may fall into the same errors. The habits and traditions of social life may excuse falsehood, and gloss it over with a finer name, but courtesy is dumb when brought face to face with Death. Of all lies none so foul as a lying epitaph; none, indeed, so purposeless, for the survivors believe it not, and the dead cares not for our praise or blame, seeing that his good and bad deeds have been weighed once for all by unerring justice and infinite mercy. "that when he was first taken to London, being then a child in arms, and saw the lamps, he exclaimed, 'Oh! now I know what the stars arethey are the lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up to heaven.'" Thus, when a baby in arms, a mother's instinct recognized in him the future poet; so, when a child in petticoats, a father's pride discerned the actual metaphysician. We quote from a diary kept by a friend of the elder Coleridge, and sent to Hartley's biographer : : Never was infant heir to the throne of Saint C. related some curious anecdotes of his son HartLouis, or the throne of Alfred, honored with more ley, whom he represented to be a most remarkable poetic incense than was the little Hartley Cole-child-a deep thinker in his infancy. He tormented ridge, heir to a famous name and dowered with a fatal infirmity. His father speaks repeatedly of him, and to him, with all a father's pride in his first-born -his" dear babe," his " babe so beautiful." And in a vein of true prophecy 66 himself in his attempts to solve the problems that drawn to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inex-| house (Mrs. Southey and Mrs. Coleridge being plicable mystery-viz., that man should be both his own subject and object, and that these two should be one. At the same early age, continued Coleridge, Hartley used to be in agony of thought, puzzling himself about the reality of existence. As when some said to him, "It is not now, but it is to be." "But," said he, "if it is to be it is." Perhaps this confusion of thought lay not merely in the imperfection of language. Hartley, when a child, had no pleasure in things; they made no impression on him till they had undergone a process in his mind, and were become thoughts or feelings. Of his subsequent progress Coleridge said little or nothing. The last sentence is significant. In truth, he seems to have abandoned metaphysics about the time he was breeched, and to have betaken himself to historical studies after a fashion of his own. He created for himself a kingdom, an island on some undiscovered sea, which he called by the marvellous name of Ejuxria. During his lonely walks he occupied himself in devising a history thereof; he fought battles, and conducted sieges, negotiated treaties and alliances, and rehearsed debates in the senate. This seems to have been the chief business of his life for years. One day, a lady, observing him to be unusually depressed in spirits, asked him the reason; he then confided to her that it was because, in spite of all his advice, his people (the Ejuxrians to wit) would go to war. Sometimes he would come to his brother, with a face of grave importance, and say--" Derwent, I have had letters and papers from Ejuxria;" and then proceed to recount, in the most fluent manner, the condition of public affairs according to the last advices. His brother adds, that he was a most firm believer in his own inventions, and continued to inhabit his ideal world, so long, that it assumed in his mind an equal consistency with the real, till at last he became quite incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction. sisters). The Laureate appears to have stood in himself an object of contempt and ridicule. All this would certainly not tend to increase his selfrespect, or develop his powers of self-command. Perhaps the wider field and ruder discipline of a public school might have brought out his latent faculties, corrected his outward extravagancies, and prepared him for the coming struggle at the University-the struggle which has to be maintained against rivals without and tempters within. A man who has been at a great public school commences the drama of life with the advantage of a previous rehearsal. Hartley could not, or would not, join in the active sports of his school-fellows; but, on the other hand, he contributed to their amusement of nights by telling them interminable stories. He would, therefore, be alternately the object of caresses and Mr. Derwent Coleridge very rightly gives us all bullying-his natural sensitiveness making him the details of this singular propensity, not only yield to the one, and his physical weakness incabecause they are important to his immediate sub-pacitating him from resisting the other. Someject, but because they afford an interesting study times, in a paroxysm of rage, he would vent his for the lovers of child-nature. All children who fury on himself by biting his arm-thus making are forbidden by their rank, education, or clean pinafores, to make dirt-pies, indulge in the building of air-castles; but we never knew or heard of so persevering an architect as young Hartley. The child is father of the man; and we have little doubt that, thirty years after, when, as we have often seen him, lazily creeping along a hedge side, and ever and anon starting off at a sharp angle for a run on the open common, he was still managing tardy negotiations, or gaining brilliant victories for the Ejuxrians. Unquestionably, such a habit proceeded from, and aggravated, the dreamy, wayward, flighty character which distinguished him through life, rendering continuous thought distasteful, and hard study all but impossible. Unfortunately, his inherent and growing defects were not counteracted by any wholesome discipline. His father, though of a most affectionate and loving nature, and tenderly attached to his children, spent little of his time at home-always roaming, as he was, in search of some chimera, such as improved health in the south of Europe, or Unitarian congregations in the west of England. So the boy was left at his own will to play truant in Ejuxria. Since 1800 he had resided, in the body at least, near Keswick. There, a few years later, Southey also came to live. The two families occupied one At all events, the besetting sin of Hartley's youth-vanity, would hardly have survived the rude ordeal. As it was, he went up to Oxford at nineteen, with an overweening sense of his own powers; so that, when he failed in obtaining the prize for English verse, his disappointment was intense, out of all proportion to the occasion. To this his brother traces all the misfortunes of his after-life; for he betook himself to the worst of comforters, the bottle. Unhappily, also, his name and great conversational talents made him a sort of lion, and many people sought his acquaintance and asked him to wine-parties for the purpose of hearing him talk. He must, however, have read between whiles, for he finally got a second class, and, a year or two later, was elected to an Oriel | caused him to mistake a ditch hard by a cloth-dyer's fellowship, having passed the examination with mill for his own bed, and how, when he rose in the great éclat. The election, however, was made con- morning, the under-side of his face was dyed a ditional on good behavior, and a year was assigned rich Kendal green, "warranted fast." as the period of probation. But, alas! the habit Some of his admirers of all classes were heartof intemperance had become so confirmed, that the less enough to amuse themselves by playing upon greatest of earthly inducements failed to conquer his simplicity, and ministering to his master-weak it. At the end of the year the fellowship was pro-ness. But these, we would fain hope, were rare nounced to be forfeited, and poor Hartley was exceptions. If ever there was a man whose frailty turned adrift upon the great sea, with no adequate means, and no definite prospects. The "Dons" of Oriel behaved throughout with delicacy and kindness; they generously made him a present of 3007., which, however seasonable, was yet to Hartley a poor substitute for the life-long independence and learned leisure which he had forfeited. He retired to the scene of his childhood and youth, "to wait for an opening," as the phrase is. But the opening never comes to those who merely wait. All the feeble efforts poor Hartley made to get on in life failed to move him a step, and each successive year left him just where it found him, with lessening hopes and growing sorrows. The fearful disease (for disease it was) which palsied all his efforts has already been mentioned; and if we dwell upon its deplorable symptoms and effects, we do so because truth requires it, and in the hope of drawing a useful and impressive lesson. The less we adorn the tale, the better we point the moral. Hartley was often an object of wondering pity, but never sank into utter contempt. Wine always tempted, often mastered, but never enslaved him. He drank of the cup of Circe, and sleptbut woke, a MAN still; for he never lost the sense of shame and reinorse. Innumerable were the good resolutions which he made of a morning, to be broken ere night; now and then he had a prolonged interval of abstinence, too often followed by more reckless indulgence. Sometimes, after an unexpected windfall, he would disappear for days, or even weeks, baffling all search, and as suddenly return to his old haunts, lean, rent, and beggared. In the fragments of a diary preserved in the memoir, we find most touching and pathetic self-accusations. The mournful burden, "what I might have been," recurs again and again, and even when unexpressed, we can trace by implication the presence of the thought. The place which he had chosen for his residence threw temptations in his way. He had become one of the lions of the lake country, and the summer visitors were ever ready to give him a dinner on condition of his keeping the table in a roar. His especial allies were the Oxonians or Cantabs who came to Ambleside by way of reading, young fellows flush of money, light of heart, and entertaining no very rooted antipathy to beer and cigars. He was, however, very catholic in his choice of friends. "Noscitur a sociis" was a test which could never have been applied to him; indeed, he was never happier than when attending a country wake. Every boor made him welcome after the hearty Westmoreland fashion, and he had the art of adapting his conversation, and even his rhymes, to the taste and capacity of the most rustic audience. His fame stood very high among the peasantry, and we venture to say, that for one who had heard of the poet Wordsworth, there were ten who had listened with open-mouthed delight to the poet Hartley. Many are the stories which his humble friends and neighbors have to tell of his freaks and misadventures. One of them relates how the mischievous sprite, John Barleycorn, once was entitled to pity, forbearance, and almost respect, that man was Hartley Coleridge. The bitterness engendered by early disappointments had joined with manifold seductions in fostering that infirmity to which persons of his temperament are peculiarly liable; those persons, we mean, in whose mind the imaginative element unduly preponderates. Such men have their fits of joyous excitement succeeded by fits of lassitude and depression, with a violence of reaction quite unknown to those of the ordinary and more sober constitution. In stormy seas, the trough of the wave sinks as far below the usual level as the crest rises above. In these periods of depression, there ensues a craving for some fictitious stimulus, a temporary relief which aggravates the evil. Add to this, poets-for those of whom we speak are poets in esse or in posse―are generally endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, and, by consequence, an eager relish for sensuous pleasure; when they are also blessed with healthy digestion and muscular strength, their animalism expends itself in some vigorous exercise, field sports, or mountain climbing; when from physical weakness this is impossible, it finds another vert. many names among those who have worthily found a niche in our English temple of the Muses must occur to every one as illustrations of this humiliating truth! The busy fiend that tempts men to the sin of intemperance loves to take up his abode in the best garnished soul, and when he has established himself, he opens the door to all the avenging furies. How The latter half of Hartley's life was scarcely marked by change of place, or variety of incident. He resided first at Grasmere, and afterwards in a cottage on the banks of Rydal water, with some worthy people of the peasant class, who took care of him. The affectionate admiration with which they regarded him should be recorded to the credit and honor of both parties. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wordsworth watched over him like a kindly fairy, and ministered to his comforts unseen. It was she who disbursed for him the little income allotted for his support, Hartley never troubling his head about the matter, and, indeed, as we believe, being perfectly ignorant whether he had anything to live upon or not. One day, a friend asked him how much rent he paid to his landlady. "Rent?" he repeated with a puzzled air; "rent? I never thought of that." Whenever Mrs. Wordsworth saw that his coat was getting threadbare, or out at elbows, a new one was ordered and substituted for the old while he was in bed. Hartley would put it on without making any remark, or, indeed, observing the change. This infantine simplicity in money matters contrasts oddly with his acute perception in things pertaining to literature and criticism. He gives us a subtle analysis of the character of Hamlet, and guesses shrewdly at the creed and politics of Shakspeare, yet we venture to say that he would have been utterly puzzled to explain the words, "receipt," ," "endorse," &c., and would not have attempted to determine what the interest of 1007. at 5 per cent. per annum would come to at it is scarcely even a joke; but to those who saw and heard little Hartley deliver himself of the sentiment, the effect was a violent, instantaneous, and universal convulsion of the midriff. town, situated in one of the valleys which intersect the bleak swelling moorlands of North-Western Yorkshire. There Edward the Sixth founded a school, which, though small in numbers, has supplied Cambridge with some of her best mathematicians and her famous Professor of Geology. Hartley was well fitted for his office by his knowledge and love of classical authors. He discharged his duties with diligence, and, in other respects, conducted himself with great discretion. the year's end. His pocket-money was doled out to him shilling by shilling, as if he were a child; and, indeed, a child he was in such matters to the end of his days. To procure a little loan on a thirsty morning, he would employ the most innocent In the spring of 1837, he went for a few months artifices, imposing upon nobody but himself. A to Sedbergh school, to supply the place of second friend of ours spending a summer at Ambleside master-an important event this, in his monotonous became very intimate with him. One day, Hartley life. Sedbergh is a small poverty-stricken marketventured to borrow a shilling, volunteering to repay it next day. Accordingly, he came, made a long call, talking as he was wont, of dead-and-gone English poems, steering clear of "The Splendid Shilling.' At last, he rose to go, had got his hand on the door: "By the way," he said, "I have brought you your shilling," (ransacking his pockets.) Then, with an air of surprise, "No! I've forgotten it.” Then, hesitating and blushing, "And-and-and-would you lend me another?" Having got the shilling, off he went at full speed. Every successive call, the scene was repeated, in the self-same words. How gladly would we have bought an hour's talk with poor Hartley at the same price! His knowledge of our literature, especially the dramatic and poetical, was both extensive and profound, and he was no niggard in the communication of it. He had a keen appreciation of tenderness and pathos, and could never hear the "May Queen" sung without shedding tears. No less keen was his sense of the ludicrous; he chuckled, shrieked, rolled, and revelled, in his reminiscences of Shakspeare's Dogberrys and Launcelots. His tastes were very catholic, and he never compared one poet invidiously with another. He never encouraged a battle among his books, but made Milton and Wordsworth, Spenser and Southey, dwell side by side, like brethren. His criticisms, the result of much thought, were in general strikingly just; only, in particular cases, personal affection led him to set undue value upon modern writers, and, when talking for the behoof of a large company, he would be sometimes tempted away from the truth by an epigrammatic paradox. On such occasions one was always disposed to echo the praise of the Westmoreland peasant, "Eh! but Maister Coleridge do talk fine!" but when he had only a single auditor, and poured out his whole heart without any desire of display, his talk was something much better than "fine." Like his father, he required nothing but a pleased and patient listener. "Charles," said the elder Coleridge one day to his friend Elia, "did you ever hear me preach ?" "I ne-ne-never heard you d-d-d-do anything else," stuttered Elia, in reply. Would that half of our preachers now-a-days had either Coleridge's fluency to help them on, or Elia's stutter to stop them altogether! It should be added, that Hartley's judgments were occasionally affirmed or reversed (in his own court) according to his humor. Now, he would extol Wordsworth as the equal of Milton-an opinion which he has recorded in print-now he would quiz and parody him. Once he said that the best of his father's poems were but good juvenile poems, after all; though his filial love would have been up in arms if any one else had said so. Mr. Blackburne, one of the then pupils, has recorded some characteristic traits in a letter to Mr. Derwent Coleridge (page 115 of the Memoir.) "I first saw Hartley," he says, "when I was at Sedbergh, and he heard us our lesson in Mr. Green's (the second master's) parlor. He was dressed in black, his hair, just touched with gray, fell in thick waves down his back, and he had a frilled shirt on; and there was a sort of autumnal ripeness and brightness about him. His shrill voice, and his quick authoritative right, right!' and the chuckle with which he translated' recum repetundarum' as 'peculation, a very common vice in governors of all ages,' after which he took a turn round the sofa-struck me amazingly. I never knew the least liberty taken with him, though he was kinder and more familiar than was then the fashion with masters. His translations were remarkably vivid; of μoyega μoyegms, toiling and moiling;' and some ship or other in the Philoctetes which he pronounced to be 'scudding under maintop-sails,' our conceptions became intelligible. Out of school he never mixed with the boys, but was sometimes seen, to their astonishment, running along the fields, with his arms outstretched, talking to himself. He was remarkably fond of the travelling shows that occasionally visited the village. I have seen him clap his hands with delight; indeed, in most of the simple pleasures of country life he was like a child." On the 29th of May, the boys having been for some reason balked of the expected holiday, revenged themselves by "stripping the hollows bare of spring," and adorning the school-room with extemporized arbors, pleasant to the eye, but as obstructive as might be to the business of the afternoon. Among other devices, the largest bough was set up tree-wise by Hartley's desk, and the exercises which awaited his perusal were suspended on the topmost twigs, well out of his reach. Hartley, however, contrived, by getting on a bench and using a hooked stick, to filch them down, and many were the jokelets which he vented on the exercise-tree, and its unripe fruit. The mischievous boys had anticipated a storm; they found sunshine; and Hartley was a double favorite ever after. About this time, a new church was constituted When in the mood of fooling, he was irresistibly in the upper part of the valley of Dent. The people comic; not that his sayings would appear funny in flocked from far and near. After the canonical themselves, if unaccompanied with the recollection ceremonies, Professor Sedgwick, who happened to of the tone and manner in which they were said. be there, got on a heap of stones, and addressed the For instance, apropos of something or other in the crowd in that unstudied eloquence which, as it came conversation, he would assume a contemptuous, six-straight from the heart of the speaker, went straight foot-high air, and say, "I hate little men; they are to the hearts of the hearers. Among them stood so conceited." This is not a good story when told; Hartley looking up with moistened eye. He had |