of
analogies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possible
development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an
abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, and
mental illusions of all sorts.

[20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight
Blisse this hous from every wicked wight,
Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster;
Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster."
--"The Miller's Tale."

[21] _Vide supra_, p. 27.

[22] "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv.

[23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed.,
vol. iii., p. 4.

[24] _Vide supra_, p. 14.

[25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his
"Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed with
a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence."

[26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like
everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was
individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official
mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed no
compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw
itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one
exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range
of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It
was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival
were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society,
history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in
particular, was presented in its full depth and richness of
meaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its
creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable
on that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation of
literary quality--than in the analysis of the principles on which its
appreciation was founded." (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth," p.
50).

[27] See "Biographia Literaria." chap. i. "From the common opinion that
the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen
Anne's reign, I altogether dissent." (Lecture "On Style," March 13,
1818).

[28] See vol. i., p. 421 ff.

CHAPTER III.

Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival.

In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during
the last year