Abstract
When Hartley Coleridge was born in the autumn of 1796, the poet was absent at Birmingham, for my Sara had strangely miscalculated, as he explained to his friend John Thelwall.1 The miscalculation and its consequences-the inopportune absence, the notification by post, the hurried return, and the final presentation of son to father-resulted in three occasional sonnets, two of which have little more than routine biographical interest. In the third, however ( Composed on a Journey Homeward; the Author Having Received Intelligence of the Birth of a Son, Sept. 20, 1796), Coleridge's paternal apprehensions-apparently he was afraid Hartley would be dead by the time he reached home-are combined with the esoteric doctrines of pre-existence and metempsychosis in a curious fantasy of anxiety and consolation.
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