be so imprisoned. It may be said of Chatterton that he was the Renascence of Wonder incarnate. To him St Mary Redcliffe Church was as much alive as were the men about whom Pope wrote with such astonishing prosaic brilliance. This is one of the reasons why he bulks so largely among the poets of the Renascence of Wonder. For this renascence was shown not merely in the way in which Man's mysterious destiny was conceived, but also in the way in which the theatre of the human drama was confronted. This theatre became as fresh, as replete with wonder, as the actors themselves. A new seeing was lent to man's eyes. And of this young poet it may almost be said that he saw what science is now affirming-the kinship between man and the lower animal; nay, even the sentience of the vegetable world further still, he felt that what is called dead matter is-as the very latest science is telling us-in a certain sense alive, shedding its influence around it.

Then came Cowper, whose later poetry, when it is contrasted with the jargon of Hayley, seems to belong to another world. But it is possible, perhaps, to credit Cowper with too much in this

matter.

He was followed by a poet who did more for the romantic movement than even the 'marvellous boy' himself could do. Although Burns, like so many other fine poets, has left behind him some poor stuff, it would be as difficult to exaggerate his intellectual strength as to overestimate his genius. For not one of his predecessors-not even Chatterton-had been able to get away from the growth of poetic diction which had at last become so rank that originality of production was in the old forms no longer possible. The dialect of the Scottish peasantry had already been admirably worked in by certain of his predecessors; but it was left to Burns to bring it into high poetry. In mere style he is, when writing in Scots, to be ranked with the great masters. No one realised more fully than he the power of verbal parsimony in poetry. As a quarter of an ounce of bullet in its power of striking home is to an ounce of duckshot, so is a line of Burns to a line of any other poet save two, both of whom are extremely unlike him in other respects and extremely unlike each other. To conciseness he made everything yield as completely as did Villon in the 'Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis' and in 'Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière,' and as completely as did Dante in the most concise of his lines. As surely as Dante's condensation is born of an intensity of imaginative vision, so surely is Burns's condensation born of an intensity of passion. Since Drayton wrote his sonnet beginning

Since ther's no helpe, come let us kiss and part !

there had been nothing in the shape of passionate poetry in rhyme that could come near Burns's lines

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

But, splendid as is his passionate poetry, it is specially as an absolute humourist that he towers above all the poets of the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly, to get away on all occasions from the shadow of the great social pyramid was not to be expected of a poet at the time and in the conditions in which Burns was born. Yet it is astonishing how this Scottish yeoman did get away from it at times, as in 'A Man's a Man for a' that.' It is astonishing to realise how he was able to show a feeling for absolute humour such as in the eighteenth century had only been shown by prose writers-prose writers of the first rank-like Swift and Sterne. Indeed, if we did not remember that he followed the creator of Uncle Toby, he would take, if that were possible, a still higher place than he now does as an absolute humourist. Not even Uncle Toby's apostrophe to the fly is finer than Burns's lines to a mouse on turning her up with a plough. But his lines to a mountain daisy which he had turned down with the plough are full of a deeper humour still-a humorous sympathy with the vegetable no less than with the animal kingdom. There is nothing in all poetry which touches it. Much admiration has been given, and rightly given, to Dorothy Wordsworth's beautiful prose words in her diary about the daffodil, as showing how a nature-lover without the accomplishment of verse' can make us conscious of the consciousness of a wild-flower. But they were written after Burns, and though they have some of Burns's playfulness, they cannot be said to show his humour. It is in poems of another class, however-in such poems as the 'Address to the De'il'-that we get his greatest triumph as an absolute humourist, for there we get what the present writer has called 'cosmic humour-the very crown and flower of absolute humour. And take 'Holy Willie's Prayer,' where, biting as is the satire, the poet's humorous enjoyment of it carries it into the rarest poetry. In 'Tam o' Shanter' we get the finest mixture of humour and wisdom, the finest instance of Teutonic grotesque, to be found in all English poetry. In 'The Jolly Beggars' Burns now and again shows that he could pass into the mood of true Pantagruelism-a mood which is of all moods the rarest and the finest—a mood which requires in the humourist such a blessed mixture of the juices as nature cannot often in a climate like ours achieve.

A true child of the Renascence of Wonder who followed Burns, William Blake, though he was entirely without humour, and showed not much power of giving realistic pictures of nature, had a finer sense of the supernatural than any of his predecessors.

And now, after this wide circuit, we are able to turn, better equipped for understanding them, to

those writers of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth who are the accredited fathers of the Renascence of Wonder. It is not the purpose of the present essay to discuss the poetry of any one of the poets of this great epoch except in regard to this Renascence. Their work will be found fully presented and analysed by eminent specialists in this volume. In 1765 Percy had published his famous collection of old ballads, and this directed general attention to our ballad literature. The first poet among the great group who fell under the influence of the old ballads was probably Scott, who in 1802 brought out the first two volumes of his priceless Border Minstrelsy. The old ballads were, of course, very unequal in quality; but among them were 'Clerk Saunders,' 'The Wife of Usher's Well,' 'The Young Tamlane,' the ballad which Scott afterwards named 'The Demon Lover,' and certain others which compel us to set the Border Ballads,' as they are called, at the very top of the pure poetry of the modern world. Coleridge, as we are going to see, could give us the weird and the beautiful combined, but he could not blend with these qualities such dramatic humanity and intense pathos as are expressed in such a stanza as this from 'Clerk Saunders,' where Saunders's mistress, after he has been assassinated by her brothers, throws herself upon his grave and exclaims :

Is there ony roome at your head, Saunders?
Is there ony roome at your feet?
Or ony roome at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain, I wad sleep?

Scott, we say, is entitled to be placed at the
head of those who are generally accredited with
originating the Renascence of Wonder in the
nineteenth century.
But great as was the influ-
ence of Scott in this matter, it is hard to see
how the effect of his romantic work would have
been so potent as it now is without the influ-
ence of Coleridge. For, as has been pointed out
in the notice of Byron in this volume, Scott's
friend Stoddart, having heard Coleridge recite
the first part of Christabel while still in manu-
script, and having a memory that retained every-
thing, repeated the poem to Scott, and Scott at
once sat down and produced The Lay of the
Last Minstrel. There is no need to say with
Leigh Hunt that Scott's vigorous poem is a coarse
travesty of Christabel in order to admit that, full
as it is of splendid poetical qualities, it is defective
in technic and often cheap in diction. Some of
Scott's romantic lyrics, however, scattered through
his novels show that it was a languid artistic con-
science alone that prevented him from taking a
much higher place as a poet than he now takes.
If he never learnt, as Coleridge did, the truth so
admirably expressed in Joubert's saying that 'it is
better to be exquisite than to be ample,' it really
seems to have been because he did not care to
learn it. For the distinctive quality of Scott is

that he seems to be greater than his work-as much greater, indeed, as a towering oak seems greater than the leaves it sheds. Coleridge's Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan are, as regards the romantic spirit, above-and far above-any work of any other English poet. Instances innumerable might be adduced showing how his very nature was steeped in the fountain from which the old balladists themselves drew, but in this brief and rapid survey there is room to give only one. In the Conclusion' of the first part of Christabel he recapitulates and summarises, in lines that are at once matchless as poetry and matchless in succinctness of statement, the entire story of the bewitched maiden and her terrible foe: which had gone before :

A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine-
Thou 'st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,

From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo!
Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell!

Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web in which the human drama and external nature are woven which is the very soul of poetic wonder. So great is the maleficent power of the beautiful witch that a spell is thrown over all Nature. For an hour the very woods and fells remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic consciousness of her

The night-birds all that hour were still.

When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from a hideous nightmare, and the night-birds' are jubilant anew. This is the very highest reach of poetic wonder-finer, if that be possible, than the night-storm during the murder of Duncan. And note the artistic method by which Coleridge gives us this amazing and overwhelming picture of the oneness of all Nature. However the rhymes may follow each other, it is always easy for the critic, by studying the intellectual and emotional movement of the sequence, to see which rhyme-word first came to the poet's mind and suggested the rhymewords to follow or precede it. It is the witch's. maleficent will-power which here dominates the poet's mind as he writes. Therefore we know that he first wrote

picture, perhaps, in all poetry called up to his imagination

The night-birds all that hour were still. The nearer in temper any other line approaches this, the nearer does it approach the ideal of poetic wonder. It is, however, owing to the very rarity of Coleridge's genius that not he but Scott popularised the romantic movement. In such purely poetical work as the first part of Christabel, which was entirely unlocalised, realistic mediæval pictures were not requisite as they were in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. After such work as Coleridge's all that the romantic revival needed was a poet who would supply it with feet in addition to wings. Scott supplied those feet. However, in the second part of Christabel, written later-in which the poem is localised after Scott's manner-Coleridge showed so much of Scott's influence that it may not be too fanciful to call these two immortal poets the binary star of romanticism revolving around one common poetic centre. Scott's poetry became so immensely popular that it soon set every poet and every versifier, from Byron downwards, writing romantic stories in octosyllabic couplets, with the old anapæstic lilt of romantic poetry.

As regards Wordsworth's share in this movement, though it was, no doubt, confined largely to poetic methods, the following superb lines from 'Yew Trees' can be set beside even Coleridge's masterpieces as regards the romantic side of the Renascence of Wonder:

Beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries-ghostly Shapes

May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow ;-there to celebrate,

As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. Whether the reaction would have died out (as did the revival of natural language by Theocritus after such comparatively feeble followers as Bion and Moschus) had not Wordsworth's indomitable will and masterful simplicity of character stood up and saved it, or whether, on the contrary, the movement was injured and delayed by this obstinacy and simplicity of character--which led him into exaggerated theories, exposing it to ridicule is perhaps a debatable question. However, it ended by the 'poetic diction' of the eighteenth century being swept away. But as to real knowledge of the mere physiognomy of mediævalism, Coleridge and Scott were perhaps on a par. Indeed, imperfect knowledge of this physiognomy was a weak point in the entire group of poets who set to work to revive it. Coleridge showed a certain knowledge of it, which, like Scott's, was

no doubt above that of Horace Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. But since the great accumulation of learning upon this subject which came afterwards for the use of English poets it seems slight enough. Abbotsford alone is enough to show that Scott did not fully escape the bastard mediævalism of the eighteenth century. If he in Ivanhoe vanquished every difficulty and wrote an immortal mediæval romance with not many touches of true mediavalism, that is only another proof of his vitalising imagination and genius. Fortunately, however, Scott was something more than a man like his successor Meinhold, who had every mediæval detail at his command. Had the author of Ivanhoe been as truly mediæval as the author of Sidonia, he would have appealed to a leisured few by whom the past is more beloved than the present; but he would not have given the English-speaking race those superb works of his which are

A largess universal like the sun.

Though the Ettrick Shepherd, in The Queen's Wake, shows plenty of the true feeling for the supernatural side of the movement, he had not sufficient governance over his vivid imagination to express himself with that concentrated energy which is one of the first requisites.

As to Wordsworth as a nature-poet, there are, of course, three attitudes of the poet towards Nature. There is Wordsworth's attitude-that which recognises her as Natura Benigna, there is the attitude which recognises her as Natura Maligna, that of the poet who by temperament exclaims with the Syrian Gnostics, 'Matter is darkness-matter is evil, and of matter is this body, and to become incarnate is to inherit sorrow and grievous pain;' and there is the attitude which recognises her as being neither benign nor malignant, but the cold, passionless, unloving mother to whom the sorrows, fears, and aspirations of man are indifferent because unknown-the attitude, in a word, of Matthew Arnold and other recent poets who have written after the general acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis.

Wordsworth's influence in regard to the painting of Nature was no doubt great upon all the poets of his time, and upon none was it greater than upon Byron, who scoffed at him. In order to see Wordsworth's influence upon Byron we have only to compare the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold with the first and second. But besides this, Byron was evidently in the later decade of his life a student of Wordsworth's theories as to the use of natural language instead of poetic diction. In Julia's letter in Don Juan, notwithstanding occasional echoes like that of Barton Booth's couplet given on page 290, Vol. II. of this work

So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole, As vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul, is an

admirable illustration of Wordsworth's aphorism, 'What comes from the heart goes to

the heart.' The same may be said concerning the pathetic naturalness of the Haidée episode. Would this ever have been written as we now have it had it not been for Wordsworth's Preface? What makes Byron an important figure in the romantic revival is that, while his own draughts of romanticism were drawn from the well-springs of Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, it was from his own reservoir that the French romantiques drank. Indeed, it may almost be said that to his influence was largely due that revival which, according to Banville, 'made French poetry leap from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth.' As regards, however, the French romantiques of the thirties to whom Banville alludes-those whose revolt against French classicism culminated, perhaps, in that great battle of Hernani before mentioned their revolt was even more imperfectly equipped with knowledge of the physiognomy of mediævalism than that of Scott.

With regard to Victor Hugo, however, it may be said that, modern as he was in temper, he was able by aid of his splendid imagination in La Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean, and indeed in many other poems, to feel and express the true renascence of wonder. But in poetry the mere physiognomy of life is only suggested in prose it has to be secured. Hugo never secured it.

Shelley's place in the Renascence of Wonder is peculiar. His vigorous imagination was partially strangled by his humanitarianism and ethical impulse, inherited largely from Rousseau. Of all the poets of this group he was by far the most influenced by the social upheaval of the French Revolution; and, of course, apart from his splendid work in so many kinds of poetry, he is a very important figure in the revival of romanticism broadly considered. But those poems of his dealing with subjects akin to those represented by the purely romantic work of the old ballads and Christabel show that in the Renascence of Wonder his place is not among the first. Queen Mab is not the least in touch with the spiritual world. And there is more of the pure romantic glamour in Keats's two lines

Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

than in the whole of The Witch of Atlas.

Southey's voluminous and industrious work upon romantic lines is receiving at this moment less attention than it deserves. There is really a fine atmosphere of romance thrown over Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama. But the atmosphere is

cold.

With regard to Keats in relation to it, the present writer has elsewhere dwelt upon the fact that, brief as was his life, he who had already passed through so many halls of the poetic palace was at one time passing into yet another-the magic hall of Coleridge and the old ballads. As expressions of the highest romantic temper there are not many

things in our literature to be set above The Eve of St Mark and La Belle Dame sans Merci.

Our object being merely to trace to its sources that stream of Romanticism upon which the poetry of the nineteenth century has been nourished, this essay should properly close with Keats. And if a word or two is here said upon the poets who immediately followed the great group, it must not be supposed that any general criticism of these latter poets is attempted.

Tennyson, in virtue of the large mass of perfect work actually done, would perhaps be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century if Coleridge had not left us among his own large mass of inferior work half-a-dozen poems which will be the wonder and the despair of English poets in all time to come. In the blending of music and colour so that each seems born of each, it is hard to think that even the poet of The Eve of St Agnes and The Ode to a Nightingale was the superior of him who gave us The Lady of Shalott and The Lotos-Eaters. But when it comes to the true romantic glamour it cannot be said that he was instinctively in touch with the old spirit. The magnificent Idylls of the King, in temper as well as in style one of the most modern poems of its time, does occasionally, as in the picture of the finding of Arthur, give us the old glamour very finely. But the stately rhetorical movement of his blank verse is generally out of harmony with it. That romantic suggestion which Shakespeare's blank verse catches in such writing as we get in the fifth act of the Merchant of Venice, and in hundreds of other passages, shows, however, that blank verse, though not so 'right' in romantic poetry as rhyme, can yet be made sufficiently flexible. It is only in the poetic methods of his rhymed poems that Tennyson successfully worked on romantic lines, though of course the naïveté, the fairy-like, unconscious grace of Coleridge at his best, were never caught by any of his successors. And yet above all nineteenth-century poets Tennyson is steeped in the absolute humour of romanticism. In Shakespeare himself there is no finer example of absolute humour than he gives us in those lines where the Northern Farmer' expresses his views on the immorality of Bessy Marris:

Bessy Marris's barne! tha knaws she laäid it to meä. Mowt a bean, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, sheä. 'Siver, I kep 'um, I kep 'um, my lass, tha mun understond;

I done moy duty boy 'um as I 'a done boy the lond.

As to Browning, in order to discuss adequately his place as regards the Renascence of Wonder a long treatise would be required. On the realistic side of the Romantic movement he is, of course, very strong. His sympathies, however, are as modern as Matthew Arnold's own, except, of course, on the theological side, where he is a century behind his great poetic contemporaries. His

desire is to express not wonder but knowingness, the opposite of wonder. In a study of his works made by the present writer many years ago, the humour of Browning was named Teutonic grotesque. The name is convenient, and nearly, though not quite, satisfactory. But subsequent writers on Browning seem to have caught it up. Perhaps Teutonic grotesque, which, in architecture at least, lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms, is the only absolute grotesque. In Italian and French grotesque the incongruity throughout all art lies in a simple departure from the recognised line of beauty, spiritual or physical; but in the Teutonic mind the instinctive quest is really not-save in music-beauty at all, but the wonderful, the profound, the mysterious; and the incongruity of Teutonic grotesque lies in expressing the emotions aroused by these qualities in forms that are unexpected and bizarre. It is easy, however, to give too much heed to Browning's grotesquery in considering his relation to Romanticism. Ruskin has affirmed that such poems as The Bishop Orders his Tomb is the best rendering to be found in literature of the old temper, and on this point Ruskin speaks with authority.

With regard to Matthew Arnold, in The Scholar Gypsy he undoubtedly shows, reflected from Wordsworth, a good deal of the realistic side of Romanticism. But there is no surer sign that his temper was really Augustan than the fact that in his selections from Gray in Ward's English Poets, he actually omits the one stanza in Gray's Elegy which shows him to have been a true poet-the stanza about the robin, above quoted in the remarks upon Gray. The Forsaken Merman, whose very name suggests the Renascence of Wonder, beautiful as it is, is quite without the glamour and magic of such second-rate poets as the author of the Queen's Wake, and has no kinship with Coleridge or the old ballads. As to his attitude towards Nature, it is in such poems as Morality and In Harmony with Nature that Arnold shows that he comes under the third category of nature-poets above mentioned. With regard to his humour, Arnold was essentially a man of the world-of the very modern world-and his humour, though peculiarly delicate and delightful, must perhaps be called relative and not absolute.

As regards the Romantic temper, two English imaginative writers only have combined a true sympathy with a true knowledge of it, and these were of more recent date-Rossetti and William Morris. They had, of course, immense advantages owing to such predecessors in literature as Meinhold, and also to the attention that had been given to the subject in Pugin's Gothic Architecture and in the works of other architects, English and foreign.

The poet of Christabel himself was scarcely more steeped in the true magic of the romantic

temper than was the writer of The Blessed Damozel and Sister Helen, while in knowledge of romance he was far behind the later poet. With regard to humour, he and Morris hold in their poetry no place either with the absolute or relative humourists, but those who knew them intimately can affirm that personally they were both humourists of a very fine order. The truth is that Rossetti consciously, and Morris unconsciously, worked upon the entirely mistaken theory that in romantic poetry humour has properly no place.

It is want of space alone that prevents our bringing prose fiction into this essay; otherwise Mr Meredith would receive more attention in these remarks than almost any other writer; but to discuss so vast a subject as that of the Renascence of Wonder as seen in prose fiction would require the space of a large book, or rather of a library.

It is hard to think that even the singer of the Ode to the West Wind is in lyric power greater than he who wrote the choruses of Atalanta and the still more superb measures of Songs before Sunrise and Erechtheus. Indeed, we have only to recall the fact that before Shelley wrote it was an axiom among poets and critics that few, if any, more metres could ever be invented in order to give his proper place to a poet who has invented more metres than all the poets combined from the author of Piers Plowman down to the present day. Mr Swinburne too seems, consciously or unconsciously, to act upon the theory that humour is out of place in romantic poetry. For in his prose writings he shows a great deal of wit and humour. With regard to form and artistic qualities generally, a new kind of poetic diction now grew up—a diction composed mainly of that of Shelley and of Keats, of Tennyson, of Rossetti, of Mr Swinburne, yet mixed with Elizabethan and more archaic formsa diction, to be sure, far more poetic in its elements than that which Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth did so much to demolish, but none the less artificial when manipulated by a purely artistic impulse for the production of purely artistic verse. It is, we say, true enough that the gorgeous and beautiful word-spinning of writers like Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Philip Bourke Marston, and those called the Pre-Raphaelite poets is far more like genuine poetry than was the worn-out, tawdry texture of eighteenth-century platitudes in which Hayley and Samuel Jackson Pratt bedecked their puny limbs. Rossetti, the great master of this kind of poetic diction, saw this, and during the last few years of his life endeavoured to get away from it when writing his superb poems, A King's Tragedy and The White Ship. His relative, Mr Ford Madox Hueffer, in his monograph on Rossetti tells us that it should be pointed out that the White Ship was one of Rossetti's last works, and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narrative under the advice of the present writer.

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON.