September 14, 1800

Hartley Coleridge (1796 to 1849) is held up as an example of the withering effect a famous father (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) can have on a son who must struggle to keep up fabulous expectations. Hartley was a drunk, was frightened by his students when he tried school teaching, and as predicted by his teachers at Oxford, wound up setting his own curtains on fire. His whole life he published little. This post is not about him, it is about his brother, Derwent Coleridge (September 14, 1800 to March 28, 1883).

Derwent was successful as his brother was not held to be. We owe an essay by Anne Fadiman in The New Yorker, "The Oakling and the Oak," for the rest of this tale.

Wordsworth, ... told Hartley’s cousin that “Derwent took away all his Books and papers, and will probably write a Memoir of Him…Hartley used to write a great deal, but rarely, I suppose, finished any thing.”

Hartley turned out to have finished more than Wordsworth—or anyone else—could have imagined. Year after year, with little hope of publication or, in the case of most of his prose, of even a single reader, he had worked long into the night, writing by candlelight with a quill pen. Derwent went through every page of Hartley’s notebooks and made fair copies for the printer. He even copied out his brother’s marginalia. Including the work Hartley had published in ephemeral journals during his London phase, there was enough for two volumes of essays and notes, and two volumes of poetry, most of it new—more than a thousand pages in all. The poems were introduced by a 194-page memoir in which Derwent described Hartley as “acute and sagacious, often under the disguise of paradox; playful and tender, with a predominance of the fancy over the imagination, yet capable of the deepest pathos; clear, rapid, and brilliant.” And thus we owe most of what we know about Hartley Coleridge to his less picturesque but in many ways more fortunate brother, a happily married clergyman who had been named for a river rather than for an eminent philosopher [David Hartley]; who had never been called a genius; ...

Here is a point from one of  Hartley's essays. Derwent included it in Essays And Marginalia By Hartley Coleridge, Edited By His Brother In Two Volumes.
(1851.)

Hartley wondered about the appearance of the crucifix in English culture, among other good questions. We quote from his essay on British poets. He argues that a culture's vision of the sublime affects its subsequent art. Hartley says that Homer can refer to sheep butchering in an artistic manner because of his heritage, but now,

....Cowper complained of the difficulty of killing a sheep with dignity in English. ..... The cat, the onion, and the beetle, were held sacred in Egypt. The Egyptian poets (but were there any?) might, therefore, write solemn hymns to Tabby, in a different vein from Gray, Southey, or even Wordsworth;— might compare the concentric orbits of the planets,...., to the coats of an onion; and refer to its efficacy "to ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears," in illustration of the effects of a moving appeal of penitence, or of beauty in distress. He might make many mystic allusions to the supposed spontaneous generation of the Scarabaeus, or compare it, in respect of its coleopterous armour and cyanean breast-plate, to "a mailed angel on a battle-day," not as a sport of fancy, but with religious seriousness. 

But it would not be discreet in a Protestant poet of the 19th or even of the 17th century to introduce any of these Egyptian archaisms into a serious, far less a religious, poem. The power of religious associations to exalt even the most repulsive objects is forcibly exemplified by the Cross. One of the most diabolical instruments of human cruelty is become the ornament of diadems, rests glittering on the heaving bosom, once adorned the knightly shield, and is still coveted as a knightly order by some who, perhaps, set little by it in any other point of view. ....

So perhaps we are writing about Hartley and Derwent both. And Kit Smart had already proven you can write about Tabby and god, (that evidence wouldn't be published for almost a century). The point is that Hartley was a subtle and thoughtful writer, as we see in this essay excerpt, a fact which Derwent made accesssible.