tends from
about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris (throwing
back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end.

In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance,
whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint influences
of the opening of mediaeval and foreign literature; of the excitement of
the wars of the French Revolution; of the more hidden but perhaps more
potent force of simple ebb-and-flow which governs the world in all
things, though some fondly call it Progress; and of the even more
mysterious chance or choice, which from time to time brings into the
world, generally in groups, persons suited to effect the necessary
changes. The "Return to Nature," or to be less question-begging let us
say the taking up of a new standpoint in regard to nature, made half
unconsciously by men like Cowper and Crabbe, assisted without intending
it by men like Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full
achievement by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, asserts itself
once for all in the _Lyrical Ballads_, and then works itself out in
different--in almost all possibly different--ways through the varying
administration of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley
and Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the
next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the third.
And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion of influence
and the character of it are by no means in proportion to the exact
poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, certainly inferior as
poets to the first four mentioned, have probably had a greater bulk of
poetical influence and poetical action on mankind at large certainly,
and a vastly earlier, more immediate and more sweeping influence on
other poets than their betters. Leigh Hunt, a poet quite of the third
rank, exercised directly and indirectly, through Shelley and Keats, an
influence on the form of poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than
any of the others, save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than
these. In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in
straightforward or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by
the death of Byron, Shelley and Keats having still more prematurely gone
before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years passed,
from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the _Lyrical Ballads_ were
brought out to take their chance to the time wh