Sara Coleridge by Virginia Woolf — Read

Coleridge also left children of his body. One, his daughter, Sara, was a continuation of him, not of his flesh inded, for she was minute, aetherial, but of his mind, his temperament. The whole of her forty-eight years were lived in the light of his sunset, so that, like other children of great men, she is a chequered dappled figure flitting between a vanished radiance and the light of every day. And, like so many of her father's works, Sara Coleridge remains unfinished. Mr. Griggs (* COLERIDGE FILLE: A BIOGRAPHY OF SARA COLERIDGE. By Earl Leslie Griggs.) has written her life, exhaustively, sympathetically; but still. dots intervene. That extremely interesting fragment, her autobiography, ends with three rows of dots after twenty-six pages. She intended, she says, to end every section with a moral, or a reflection. And then "on reviewing my earlier childhood I find the predominant reflection. ." There she stops. But she said many things in those twenty-six pages, and Mr. Griggs has added others that tempt us to fill in the dots, though not with the facts that she might have given us.

"Send me the very feel of her sweet Flesh, the very look and motion of that mouth--O, I could drive myself mad about her," Coleridge wrote when she was a baby. She was a lovely child, delicate, large-eyed, musing but active, very still but always in motion, like one of her father's poems.