'I Have Lost the Race I Never Ran'

What is sadder than early promise unfulfilled? Think of the one-time prodigies, the whiz kids who withered. Think of Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), the poet’s son, who inherited some of his father’s unhappy habits -- alcohol, not laudanum -- and few of his gifts. He was the little boy about whom his father wrote in “Frost at Midnight”: 

“My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes!”

 

Hartley and his parents were frequently estranged and he was largely raised by Robert Southey. He started drinking early and was expelled from Oriel College at Oxford. His life was littered with half-completed projects, including an unfinished lyric drama, Prometheus. In the second volume of his Samuel Taylor Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes writes of the elder poet’s final days:

 

“The figure who still haunted Coleridge was Hartley, a reproachful ghost of his own lost youth. The schoolmastering had failed, a second attempt at journalism in Leeds had been abandoned, and from 1829 he was again adrift in the Lake District, living mainly with a kindly family of farmers outside Grasmere.”

 

In 1833, Samuel was surprised to receive a copy of Hartley’s first and only book, Poems, dedicated to his father. In one of his sonnets he writes: “I have lost the race I never ran,” and says in “Lines——”:

 

“Because I bear my Father’s name

    I am not quite despised,

My little legacy of fame

    I’ve not yet realized.”

 

Hartley made his way home, drunk as usual, on a winter night in 1849, developed bronchitis and died on January 6 at age fifty-two. William Wordsworth, a year away from his own death, buried him in the Grasmere churchyard beside his family's graves. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on this date, July 25, in 1834 at age sixty-one.