stoppage of his allowances from home. Naturally intelligent people thought and talked of little else for years after 1789.

Thus, then, the romantic movement grew. Begun in the age of Pope by a reaction against his polished form and a reversion to the variety and sincerity of feeling of the Elizabethans, it was deeply influenced by the growth of interest in the folk-songs and ballads, by the revival of a love for the mediæval, and by the struggle across the Channel for liberty. It was a movement of rich variety, dominated by no one school of thought or method. The work of one is a return to simplicity of style, with depth of thought and sincerity of emotion, of another is marked by emphasis upon the fantastic, imaginative elements of medievalism, of another is a modern rendition of ancient folklore, of another is a fanatical adherence to the principles of freedom. Each in his own way feels and interprets the new life in English poetry. The romantic movement is, indeed, as Hugo called it, "liberalism in literature."

During this period, in the north arose a poet who, although by birth and education out of touch with the direct course of the romantic revival, exemplified in his lyrics prominent elements in that movement. It is difficult to account for Robert Burns. Born into a life and environment similar to those of thousands of other Scotch peasant boys, he rose by his native genius to be the foremost literary figure of his time. That his irregular life brought its inevitable result in ostracism and early death cannot affect the beauty and melody of his songs. In these songs, Burns is without peer. Love, humor, satire, pathos, intimate sympathy with nature and with man, all find a place in them. He wrote poetry not by rule, but by instinct. "Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing poetry by rule,” he said in his first preface, "he sings the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him in his and their native language." He is distinctly the poet of nature, expressing in simple familiar language the emotions common to all men.

IX. ROMANTICISM

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The conscious recognition of the new movement in poetry came with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated to produce this thin volume of poems written in accordance with new and original — so far as classical rules went — principles of poetry. Later each of the poets explained in prose, Wordsworth in his Prefaces and Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, what these new principles were, dwelling upon simplicity of diction, truth to nature, power of the imagination, and universality of subject-matter. Wordsworth's insistence upon universality of subject-matter and simplicity of diction clashed with the beliefs of the fast-vanishing classical school, for it had long been the belief that certain subjects and situations were in themselves peculiarly adapted to poetic treatment in contrast to other subjects, and that the poet's task was merely to give to such subjects and situations their perfect embodiment in expression. Hence came the classical finish and polish, hence the conscious artificiality of much of the work of the classical school.

But after all, important as the new principles were, the romantic movement is not now known by its principles so much as by its product. Wordsworth and Coleridge were true poets, gifted with the divine insight and faculty of expression that reveals to men the unknown beauties of the world in which they live. Wordsworth was from his youth peculiarly sensitive to natural influences; he came to believe all nature to be directly infused with the presence of a living God; and he realized that the truth that lay behind the universal experiences of men, the common passions and labors, hopes and fears, was the only subject of poetic interest. Nature, and man in nature, were, therefore, his poetic material. A poet, he writes, “is a man speaking to men: a

man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him, delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."

Coleridge's greatest single work was the Ancient Mariner, in which he created by imaginative suggestion an illusion of reality about a supernatural subject. Coleridge represents a different phase of the revival from that represented by Wordsworth, namely, the love of the mysterious and unfathomable in nature. We see it again in Christabel, we feel it in the wonderful verses to Genevieve. His speculative mind was naturally drawn to mystery and his poetic genius gave to the mysterious apt expression. His vivid imagination, his perfect use of suggestion, his inspired melody of verse stamp him naturally as the greater poet of the two, but unhappily the promise of his young manhood was drowned in laudanum. His later critical writings, great as they are, cannot compensate us for the loss to creative poetry.

The Lyrical Ballads were not immediately popular. No one could make head or tail out of the Ancient Mariner, and but very few appreciated Tintern Abbey. The poetry was too new; the principles enunciated (1800) in the preface were too startling. The literary world could more easily appreciate the first poetry of Walter Scott, which followed more directly the natural development of the revival of interest in the folk-poetry. Scott in 1802-03 published a collection of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and followed this two years later with his first original poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. This narrative poetry, vigorous, heroic, rapid, was at once understood and widely read. Continuing in this vein, Scott poured forth tale after tale in verse, awakening England and Scotland to a high pitch of enthusiasm, then suddenly, with the rise of a new star and the relative decline in popularity of his own poems, stopped, turned to prose, and with his romantic fiction achieved an even greater popularity than before.

Scott's poetry was both romantic and immediately popular. To-day we read it for its absorbing narrative interest rather than for its high imaginative quality. Occasional songs and ballads, interspersed in the action of his poems, show great lyrical genius. Scott was not, however, a careful artist: his scenes and characters are hastily limned and then the succession of incidents occupies all our attention.

X. HEIGHT OF ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

As the romantic movement was characteristically a movement for freedom in literature, it was natural that in its manifestations it should reflect, more than the literature of Pope's influence ever had, the differing individualities of its writers. Thus, as we have already seen, Wordsworth was a romanticist by virtue of his return to nature and to simplicity of expression, Coleridge by his strangeness and mystery cloaked by an illusion of reality, and Scott by his direct continuance of the tradition of the old narrative ballad story. All of these were for a time eclipsed by a new genius who won unprecedented popular success by the imaginative selfrevelation of an individual mind endowed with great energy and openly rebellious against the social and political constraints of the time. The spirit of the French Revolutionists, which appealed to a very large section of the English people, found nowhere a more brilliant exponent than George Gordon, Lord Byron.

The first two cantos of Childe Harold appeared in March of 1812, and, as Byron expressed it, "I awoke in the morning to find myself famous." The poet-peer had caught to a nicety the

romantic sensibility of his contemporary world. Within the next few years he astonished and delighted the fashionable London world with a succession of poetic romances, wildly extravagant in plot, intensely individual in style, and imaginatively representative of the tacit unrest in the social order of his day. His social ostracism consequent upon his separation from his wife drove him abroad, whence he could indulge himself even more freely in satire against the bondage of English conventions and, indeed, of all conventions. His later works are all infused with this cynical disparagement of social bonds, this cry of the individual for freedom. His death when aiding the Greeks in their struggle for independence crowned the work of his life with the spirit of self-sacrifice and did much to efface the memory of his past misdeeds.

As a poet Byron was supremely gifted. Through his own intense individuality he caught a universal spirit of his time, the spirit of dissatisfaction and revolt, and embodied it in imaginative forms. Byron was a romanticist, but a romanticist representative of his own age rather than of an interest in and love for the past.

With Bryon we may associate another poet of revolt, Shelley. Shelley, too, was of noble lineage, and suffered social ostracism because he chose to break with the conventions of English society. Shelley, too, found his happiness abroad, there composing many of his greatest poems. Shelley, too, was an individualist, but where Byron's individualistic revolt carried him into practical immorality and bitter and contemptuous satire as a protest against the hypocrisy of the smug London world, Shelley's led him into the realm of the ideal where he endeavored to create a life free from the constraints imposed by what he believed to be ignorance and tyranny. Few people have been so unworldly as Shelley. He lived continually amid visions created by his own vivid imagination. His poetry reflects the passionate fervor of his mental life: he was forever trying to cast in the mould of language the insubstantial images that crowded upon him, to fix indelibly the spirit of wind, or of the bird, or of man. His task was foredoomed to failure, but in the very failure lay success, for his ideals are the ideals of all men and the pain he expresses is the common agony we all suffer.

John Keats, almost unnoticed during his life, has risen in time to a place beside Shelley among the poets of the early part of the century. His poetry, however, and his life were both widely different from the poetry and life of Shelley: there is scarcely more to link their names together than the fact that they were contemporary lyric poets. Keats was not a poet of revolt, for during the whole of his short life he kept aloof from human interests to lose himself in his love for beauty. He did not condemn social customs because in his poetical life he took no interest in them. Poetry was to him a passion, the very essence of life, and the truth of poetry was beauty. He sought this beauty especially in the myths and legends of the past, not alone in Grecian literature but in English. He enriched the romantic movement by recapturing the spirit of the Elizabethan poets. He was drawn to the Elizabethans by their splendid imagery, their easy flowing verse, their fiery enthusiasm and force. He attempted to treat the classical myths with the Elizabethan freedom. He sought for subjects in which he might embody the forms of beauty that flitted before his imagination. His best work is in poems like Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes, where the interest of the narrative is to him secondary to the picturesque situations and environment. He excelled in gorgeous word-painting, visualizing and expressing his scenes with rare imagination.

XI. THE VICTORIAN AGE

A literary revival cannot be maintained continuously at its height of emotional inspiration. Roughly speaking, we may locate the romantic revival between 1780 and 1830; after the latter

year we pass by degrees into the sober after-thought of the Victorian era. Where the romantic revival was marked by an enthusiasm for rebellion against established conventions, a liberalism in art, a love for the simple and natural, the quieter and calmer Victorian age is characterized by introspection and by moral purpose. The new age fostered prose rather than poetry. A large and most important body of prose criticism appeared, showing how the new age needed time and thought to assimilate the inspired lessons of the romanticists. The novel, essay, and history made greater strides than the poem. And both in prose and verse a strong underlying moral purpose is evident, a probing into reasons for social, civil, and religious ills and an attempt to cure them.

Matthew Arnold remains one of the prominent poets of the period. He was a highly educated man, preaching the crusade of culture against philistinism with a passionate zeal and sincerity. The prose essays in criticism have established for him a higher reputation, perhaps, than has his poetry, and yet he was professor of poetry at Oxford and the small body of poetry he has left ranks high.

In his poetry Arnold reflects a certain hesitation and doubt on fundamental religious conceptions. He inherited from his home environment a positive belief in accepted dogma, but his own intellectual desire for more and exact knowledge brought continual questioning and uncertainty. In his poems are recurrent notes of sadness and regret, perhaps inspired by his inward struggle between faith and skepticism. His poetry is intellectual rather than emotional. He found his true expression in his critical writings.

Much more completely than Arnold did Tennyson reflect the temper of his time, for where Arnold's range was narrow, Tennyson's was broad. Tennyson not only revealed contemporary doubts and fears, but also contemporary ambitions, hopes, enthusiasms, ideals. Arnold was critic as well as poet, and inspector of schools and professor at Oxford as well as critic and poet: Tennyson was only a poet: All his life long, Tennyson's whole devotion was to poetry. He occupied a unique place, for he was not a poet, but the poet of his country.

Not until 1842 was his position established; after the publication of his Poems in that year, containing such treasures as Ulysses and Morte d'Arthur, his supremacy was never questioned. In 1850 he succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate and published In Memoriam, on which he had worked at intervals during the previous sixteen years. The last of the Idylls of the King appeared in 1885, the first having been written (not then with a definite idea of an epic cycle) more than forty years before. He wrote steadily until the year of his death, his later works retaining much of the beauty and inspiration of his earlier.

It is difficult now to place Tennyson with certainty in his relative rank among English poets, for we are still so near him that the glamour of his life and contemporary fame blind us. It is doubtful whether he is to be considered as a great original genius, the introducer of new ideas into the world of men. He seems not so much the leader of men as their representative man. He incorporates contemporary ideas in verse: he does not add to the sum of human knowledge. He is the result of his age rather than the creator of his age.

As a poet Tennyson's work is the union of the best qualities of his predecessors: he had the visionary sweetness of Spenser, the simplicity of the ballads as revived in the style of Wordsworth, the majestic power of Milton, the beauty of Keats. It must be admitted, however, that with the union of these qualities, each quality loses a little of its special perfection. Perhaps we feel in Tennyson art rather than inspiration, the sane and worthy poet rather than the seer whose fire is direct from heaven.

Tennyson represented the emotions and ideals of his age: his great contemporary, Robert Browning, strove to pierce deeper into the individual soul in search of the ultimate spiritual

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secrets. Browning's degree of success may win for him, in the final judgment of men in years to come, a higher rank than Tennyson. His admirers even now place him second only to Shakespeare.

Browning's ideals in poetry were of the highest. Were we to judge him by these he would indeed rank, not below, but with, Shakespeare, for he sought to find the springs of human thought, feeling, and action, and reveal them to men. He had the insight of a true poet, the vision of a seer and a prophet. With this he combined a rare mental breadth and freedom from bias. He hated cant and hypocrisy and any evidence of these. He impresses us at times as fain to accept unquestioningly the essential rightness of things in this perplexing world of involved sin, suffering, virtue, and happiness; but the man who could write the Ring and the Book can scarcely be accused of narrowness.

If Browning had this poetic insight and breadth of view, why cannot he rank indisputably with our greatest? The difficulty lies in his expression. His idioms, his constructions, his language have from his first publications proved a stumbling-block to the wide popular appreciation of his genius. His imaginative creations, wonderfully true and beautiful in their conception, are too often misshapen and warped in their material embodiment. Where a reader's mental effort is distracted continually from the idea to the knotty involved phrases and ejaculations by which the idea is cast forth, that reader is likely to cease the effort. The formation of a Browning society in Browning's lifetime was not a compliment to the poet, but a confession of weakness: it has actually done him more harm than good in stamping him as the poet of a clique rather than the poet of mankind. Shakespeare needed no Shakespearean society in his lifetime to interpret his plays to those who thronged daily to the Globe.

As time goes on, however, the ill-fame of Sordello and the ill-advised eulogies of the Browning clique are losing their effect, and among an ever-widening class of cultivated readers Browning is being recognized as worthy to stand among the great poetic creators in our literature. More and more people are braving the difficulties of style to grasp the imaginative vision beneath. He emerges greater as he is more popularly understood.

Browning is the last of the giants. With him who died but a generation ago this outline can fitly close. Much poetry has been written since he died, but none that bears the stamp of lasting greatness. What figures are on the horizon we can but dimly guess. Of one thing, however, we can feel sure: the age of poetry is not gone and will never go. So soon as an inspired poet speaks to men, then will the souls of men respond as they have in the past. A love of poetry is the essence of great thought and great living.