chapter all to himself, in which his “genius” is
mentioned eleven times, whereas hartley is al-
lotted less than a page and a half—one thirty-
ninth of a chapter called “Lesser Poets.”
From Samuel Taylor Coleridge to humphry Davy, July 25, 1800:
My dear Davy
…hartley is a spirit that dances on an
aspin leaf—the air, which yonder sallow-
faced & yawning Tourist is breathing, is
to my Babe a perpetual nitrous oxyde.
never was more joyous creature born…
hartley was not quite four when his father
wrote those ecstatic lines. Their recipient, the
chemist humphry Davy, operated a labora-
tory that investigated the medical properties
of gases. hence the reference to nitrous oxide,
which Davy had christened “laughing gas” and
experimentally administered to his friend the
previous year. STC enjoyed it thoroughly.
If air intoxicated hartley, hartley intoxi-
cated STC—and had since that first embrace,
two hours after the father first laid eyes on the
son. STC confided to a friend that he com-
posed poetry with a diaper pinned to his knee,
warming by the fire, and that when hartley
laughed, he was so overcome with fondness
that he wept. By the time hartley was seven, it
is no exaggeration to say he had inspired some
of the greatest poems ever written in English.
There is “Frost at Midnight,” in which STC
looks at the “Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled
by my side” and hopes that as a man he will
wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the
crags
of ancient mountain, and beneath the
clouds…
There is the conclusion to Part II of “Christabel,”
in which hartley is the “little child, a limber elf,/
Singing, dancing to itself.” And there is “The
