Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and
accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most
pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love that is
in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in
"Woods and rills;
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The peace that is among the lonely hills."
Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual
emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political
revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. Keats for verdurous
glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and Coleridge, though like Byron
they are less with nature than with romance, share the same communion.
This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened their
communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation with what
had before been created in literature and art. The romantic revival is
the Golden Age of English criticism; all the poets were critics of one
sort or another--either formally in essays and prefaces, or in passing
and desultory flashes of illumination in their correspondence.
Wordsworth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of Burns which
contains such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien
to his sympathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his
_Biographia Literaria_, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies
at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats in
his letters; Shelley in his _Defence of Poetry_; Byron in his satires
and journals; Scott in those lives of the novelists which contain so
much truth and insight into the works of fellow craftsmen--they are all
to be found turning the new acuteness of impression which was in the air
they breathed, to the study of literature, as well as to the study of
nature.
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