SOURCE: “Hartley Coleridge's Prose,” in A Poet's Children: Hartley and Sara Coleridge, Methuen and Co., 1912, pp. 287-97.

In the following essay, Towle praises the “robustness and vigour” of Coleridge's biographical sketches, noting his careful and diligent attention to form. The essay also reviews Coleridge's other prose works, including Essays and Marginalia.

Selected passages from poems can give but an inadequate, if not misleading idea, of poets whose range and modes of utterance differ as widely as the flight and song of birds. It is even more difficult to convey a true impression of voluminous prose writings by means of extracts.

Hartley Coleridge's pen, when he took it in hand, was ready enough and almost as fluent as his speech; but, like his poems, of a disconnected character; or perhaps it would be more correct to say he chose of set purpose subjects which could be confined to the...