les, and the P

along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book,

lours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . . for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavo

f English thought, he influenced his own and the following generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from Germany in 1799 and hi

proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to t

of the Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the 'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the 'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique character-for

ld as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his "suggestive and adumbrative manner"-not, indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet "quite d

In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a strengthened perception of the e

y image o

cy's eye shal

ion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's collection of ballads may bear to the most po

other reader-and which no other books make to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they seem written to him-are more to him, in a way, than S

ld suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal note, explaine

ongos heu!

nis consumuis

elings even in poetry." Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things-grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend; the distant p

he dark and

hen the moon i

watch upon the

rs" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin

most lamen

s proceed from O

n than that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs

our life alone does nature live: Ours is

which stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's "To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence,

and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester C

e b

iles on the g

en tower that

," "Midsummer Night's Dream," the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. The li

more proud ch

right and peal

high her idle

dering harp has half

udes to Gray's "Fatal S

orms of the ancient Dru

luttering fanc

its of a degen

shade of elde

ttlements, the

fin harps the

melancholy tr

working of some

ectres of the

A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself-and incidentally Bowles-in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapte

ed thee, Bowles! fo

soothes me, li

the sunny shower

lousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his "El

e, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (sic) I.'" Campbell replied in the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to

e of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural accessories-the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind-Bowles had said, the ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. "So they are," admits Byron, "and p

Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction

made better

es that mean:

adds to natu

de: the art it

not in his subjects-so far Campbell and Byron were right-but in his mood; in his imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an a

s, once a s

e restless

sused and s

Mar

s a characteristic passa

so contains an

reast a sparkli

ht kiss and in

's lines the humble domestic implement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet-or perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word-is ind

logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose." Indeed, t

mantic and would seem to have had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron-and William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side-viz., his wit and understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain "Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to pri

en of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, "had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he will undertake to find more lines teeming with imagination in Pope than in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies that all except the cl

iterary opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scot

as it is, cannot be dismissed here without full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven "fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the

ze blew, the w

ow follo

first that

at sile

stantly returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or

e sky And nowhere did abide

y, day after

n of "the creatures of the calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying moon

the Middle Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the mor

ho died o

mother sen

deep did r

r this s

garden bower and the procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in miniature paintin

cident, which he read in Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis' "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and surmises-what s

the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone.

ams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which-according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy-the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delic

f proportion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of "Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself "charact

uest! this s

wide, wide

r's "Soliloquy of Alexander Selkirk," eve

cript. Coleridge used to read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that

lose a wondrou

she sits in

ncient Mariner," and is full of Gothic elements: a mo

ed within a

n battle array

t into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to ha

en in variations of the octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly but "in

the hall that

ightly as

e flat, the br

own white a

lady passed

light, a f

bel saw the

else saw s

the shield of S

a murky old ni

read, said

seldom sle

the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect

ady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of, not to tell," [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the "Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the general situation-the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, and the strange lady-are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the Forest"; and that Bürger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But Quellenforschungen of this kind are very unimportant. It is more important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity and suspends-not simp

ero from all human life amid the solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured-in a less degree, to be sure-by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and her victim

up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to Winderm

d been friends

with the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold le

he first stanza of the "Lay" Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"-"Jesu Maria shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, gliding down

ng pitch an

a witch's

rse, from

, like a w

n and blue

vid flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, t

elvis

in hoar

of St. Agnes." Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, ch

ines dim in

moonbeam e

thout its l

r carved s

figures stra

t of the ca

dy's cha

th twofold

d to an an

avourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless Genevieve leans against the statue of an ar

breaks off with a picture of an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of a specificall

evening

pel on t

hanters sad

ers burnin

sses chant

ere D

that marvellous opium dream, "Kub

ace, as holy

th a waning m

ling for her

n ending of "The

ht's bone

good swo

with the sai

lish romantics put forth no body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticism w

ad never before been applied in England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses to the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment was commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of passages from A. W. von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Litteratu

, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of failures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and "Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and moonlight, dripping caverns, dunge

e vol. i., pp. 419-21. For his early interest in Perc

all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between a precious essence and a

und die Englische Romantik,

that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism

Romantic School," by Alois Brandl. Lady Eas

ol. i., p

ritten chiefly on Pictur

Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon Westminster B

vol. i.,

xvii., "On Rev

nnet xi., "

magic of their

wondrous childh

Mahony's "The Be

ild would, in the

cradle their

also resounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for the Aeolus' har

ction: An

SONNE

ber,

nge music in t

e autumnal eve

od's cold cove

ees, on the roug

mes scatter the

des, beneath t

assed the happie

hou wilt mark

with whom suc

ared, to distant

urn! return,

be thy coming

not with thy

shades is gone,

h, that mouldering long hast hung,

le Coleridge pas

e and tumid

rds and Scot

ugust, 1819, "Rem

ere yet in these

s obtained mi

nd wit with

s, nourished si

appy isle, a Po

soul to charm, n

ion's praise a

eople's, as the

Dryden, Pope

allowed bays t

rds and Scot

also a reply to the Quarterly reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the London Magazine, and was first printed in vol. xvii., Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the Pamphleteer.] "An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in his Specimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, Esq., Editor of the New Monthly Magazine, in Consequence of an Article in that Publication" (1822). "Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of Poetical Criticism," London, 1

s unslaked, with

t laugh nor

nslaked, with b

heard me

sails that gl

tless go

e her ri

Chris

ght chilly

s chilly, b

vol. i.,

sh equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books," full of analogies, images, and reflections-topics and suggestions for possible development in fut

rist and Sei

ous from ever

mare, the whit

thou, Seint P

iller's

de supr

hia Literaria

n a letter about Edmund Kean.

de supr

his "Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is he

h the one exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in particular, was presen

the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen An

vol. i.,