Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained:Hartley Coleridge's Fable of Defeat Judith Plotz (bio) From all accounts "Li'le Hartley," "poor Hartley" Coleridge, eldest son of Samuel Taylor and Sara Coleridge, was the most beguiling child anyone had ever seen.1 Yet the pathetic story of his life, from precocious infancy to wasted manhood, is a paradigmatic romantic failure, the failure of the supremely gifted child who does not fulfill the enormous promise of his youth. Romanticism taught us, as—more to the point—it taught Hartley, to regard childhood powers of consciousness and temperament as normative. To be a successful Romantic Child, as Hartley so beautifully was, and then go on to be an adult success "carry[ing] the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood" (S. T. Coleridge, Biographia 1:80-81) by accepting the responsibilities of adulthood without letting go of any of the priveleged insights of childhood was a feat not only beyond Hartley's strength, but beyond his real wishes. All Hartley's writings and all Hartley's adult behavior explicitly and implicitly present a child who will not grow up, who refuses adulthood. This pattern is most strikingly manifested in "Adolf and Annette," the fairy story printed below for the first time. In the tale Hartley sets forth with bitter clarity his vision of childhood as paradise, as high success, and of adulthood as hell, as bitterest failure. This essay briefly sketches Hartley's development from boy wonder to ossified boy and then gives a reading of "Adolf and Annette" as a parable of growing up in general and of Hartley's romantic rearing in particular. The eldest child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a doting and observant parent (when he was there), the nephew of Southey (in whose household he was reared), the "darling" of the village (S. T. Coleridge, Letters 2:1022), Hartley was celebrated in earliest childhood in major romantic works: he is the babe in Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "The Nightingale" as well as the "fairy thing with red round cheeks" in "Christabel"; he is the recipient of Wordsworth's "To H. C. Six Years Old" as well as the alleged inspiration for the [End Page 133] "best Philosopher . . . Seer blessed" of the Immortality ode (Hartman 35-41 and Newlyn). From babyhood, the boy seemed a "piscis rarissima," "a thing sui Generis," "an utter Visionary! like the Moon among thin Clouds . . . in a circle of light of his own making—he alone, in a Light of his own" (S. T. Coleridge, Letters 2:960, 802, 1014). Two qualities in the boy struck all observers: his whisking, whirling, almost disembodied joy in nature and his powers of mind. Unlike his earthy, rosy, cake-loving baby brother Derwent, Hartley was an ethereal being, so preoccupied with his thinking that he had to be reminded to eat and even then "put the food into his mouth by one effort, and made a second efffort to remember that it was there & to swallow it" (ibid. 2:1022). Most descriptions stress the airy lightness of young Hartley's movements, "like a blossom in a May breeze" (ibid. 2:668), and stress as well his affinity to the spirit of life in nature, likening him to those aspects of the natural world that are most ethereal. Wordsworth's tribute emphasizes the boy's powers of spontaneous joy, his "breeze-like motion and . . . self-born carol" (Poems 1:522). Hartley's other boyhood characteristic, his "prodigious and unnatural intellect," was even more striking and earned him the nicknames of "young philosopher" from Lamb (Letters 1:180) and "Moses" from Southey (Letters 1:241).2 Hartley was no knowledge-stuffed homunculus—neither Coleridge nor Southey nor his awe-struck schoolmaster, Mr. Dawes, made any effort to force advanced studies early—but he exhibited a preoccupation with what he called "thinking of my Thoughts" (S. T. Coleridge, Letters 2:1014), or what his father called "Thinking as a pure act & energy . . . Thinking as distinguished from Thoughts" (S. T. Coleridge, Notebooks 1:923), to the exclusion of such bodily joys as eating and playing. Southey reported: The boy's great delight is to get his father to talk metaphysics...