Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

And so, more than any other writer of the age, he invests the common life
of nature, and the souls of common men and women, with glorious
significance. These two poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the
romantic genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater
literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audiences.

The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of
poetry. The previous century, with its practical outlook on life, was
largely one of prose; but now, as in the Elizabethan Age, the young
enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing. The
glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Moore, and Southey. Of its prose works, those of Scott
alone have attained a very wide reading, though the essays of Charles Lamb
and the novels of Jane Austen have slowly won for their authors a secure
place in the history of our literature. Coleridge and Southey (who with
Wordsworth form the trio of so-called Lake Poets) wrote far more prose than
poetry; and Southey's prose is much better than his verse. It was
characteristic of the spirit of this age, so different from our own, that
Southey could say that, in order to earn money, he wrote in verse "what
would otherwise have been better written in prose."

It was during this period that woman assumed, for the first time, an
important place in our literature. Probably the chief reason for this
interesting phenomenon lies in the fact that woman was for the first time
given some slight chance of education, of entering into the intellectual
life of the race; and as is always the case when woman is given anything
like a fair opportunity she responded magnificently. A secondary reason may
be found in the nature of the age itself, which was intensely emotional.
The French Revolution stirred all Europe to its depths, and during the
following half century every great movement in literature, as in politics
and religion, was characterized by strong emotion; which is all the more
noticeable by contrast with the cold, formal, satiric spirit of the early
eighteenth century. As woman is naturally more emotional than man, it may
well be that the spirit of this emotional age attracted her, and gave her
the opportunity to express herself in literature.

As all stron