148 Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 



— who " find it impossible to refuse the name of father of the 

 New Romantic School " to the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul 

 that perished in his pride — Chatterton of the Rowley MSS. 



I stand upon safer ground when I advance the year 1798 and 

 the publication of the Lyrical Ballads as the definite turning 

 point of the movement. The heavens were grey no longer; the 

 sun of poetry was climbing rapidly towards its zenith. Not 

 through Eastern windows only was the light coming in ; west- 

 ward too the land was bright. And I think the year 1832 closes 

 this epoch better than any other. It was a dark year, this, for 

 Scotland. The Eildons still dominate fair Melrose, but in 1832 

 the Wizard ceased to spell from them their lesson of lonely 

 grandeur: the Tweed still raves over its bed of gravel, but for 

 three-quarters of a century there has been no Laird for it to sing 

 full of dark Border Romance. Scott died in 1832 (and Crabbe), 

 and if you tell me that Wordsworth still lived, and Coleridge, and 

 Lamb, and Southey, and Campbell, and De Quincey, I reply that 

 the best work of these men was done. " It is no exaggeration to 

 says," remarks Mr Arnold, "that mthin one single decade, 

 between 1798 and 1808, almost all Wordsworth's first-rate work 

 was produced." And he was born, note you, in 1770, and lived 

 to 1850. In 1798 Keats was three years old, Shelley six, and 

 Byron ten; in 1832 they had all been dead for eight years or 

 more. 



These two dates then, the year 1798 and the year 1832, are 

 fairly definitive of the period. No other period in English 

 Literature — not even the Elizabethan — can vie with it in mass 

 and rapidity of production ; hardly in splendour of literary 

 achievement is it surpassed by even that glorious age. 



It is customary to speak of the Romantic Revival as a 

 reaction in favour of poetry as against prose, and to some extent 

 this is correct. Hear the words of Pope : " I chose verse because 

 I could express ideas (in it) more shortly than in prose itself." 

 That is to say. Pope chase verse, not because he felt the need of 

 verse — contrast Tennyson, " I do but sing because I must ' ' — ■ 

 but because he found it a superior kind of prose. But the 

 Romantic Revival was more than a protest against prose or even 

 against the qualities of classical poetry. It was a great move- 

 ment of the soul of man : the Spirit of Wonder in Poetry was 



