ing and set about with portraits
of real personages. The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing
with contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish
character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of
colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people
acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination.

Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of
imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival
brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between
the visible world and another world which is unseen. The supernatural
which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English
literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors,
and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and
fascination. There is nothing in earlier English literature to set
beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_,
and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far
beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked
on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind.

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