A History of English Literature

things, the details of Nature and of life. In expression, of course, this
brings about a return to specific words and phraseology, in the desire to
picture objects clearly and fully. 7. There is an increasing democratic
feeling, a breaking away from the interest in artificial social life and a
conviction that every human being is worthy of respect. Hence sprang the
sentiment of universal brotherhood and the interest in universal freedom,
which finally extended even to the negroes and resulted in the abolition of
slavery. But from the beginning there was a reawakening of interest in the
life of the common people--an impulse which is not inconsistent with the
love of the remote and unusual, but rather means the discovery of a
neglected world of novelty at the very door of the educated and literary
classes. 8. There is a strong tendency to melancholy, which is often
carried to the point of morbidness and often expresses itself in meditation
and moralizing on the tragedies of life and the mystery of death. This
inclination is common enough in many romantic-spirited persons of all
times, and it is always a symptom of immaturity or lack of perfect balance.
Among the earlier eighteenth century Romanticists there was a very
nourishing crop of doleful verse, since known from the place where most of
it was located, as the 'Graveyard poetry.' Even Gray's 'Elegy in a Country
Churchyard' is only the finest representative of this form, just as
Shakspere's 'Hamlet' is the culmination of the crude Elizabethan tragedy of
blood. So far as the mere tendency to moralize is concerned, the eighteenth
century Romanticists continue with scarcely any perceptible change the
practice of the Pseudo-classicists. 9. In poetic form, though the
Romanticists did not completely abandon the pentameter couplet for a
hundred years, they did energetically renounce any exclusive allegiance to
it and returned to many other meters. Milton was one of their chief
masters, and his example led to the revival of blank verse and of the
octo-syllabic couplet. There was considerable use also of the Spenserian
stanza, and development of a great variety of lyric stanza forms, though
not in the prodigal profusion of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.
JAMES THOMSON. The first author in whom the new impulse found really
definite expression was the Scotsman James Thomson. At the age of
twenty-five, Thomson, like many of his countrymen during his century and
the previous one, came fortune-hunting to London, and the next year, 1726,
while Pope was issuing his translation of 'The Odyssey,' he published a
blank-verse poem of several hundred lines on 'Winter.' Its genuine though
imperfect appreciation and description of Nature as she appears on the
broad sweeps of the Scottish moors, combined with its novelty, gave it
great success, and Thomson went on to write also of Summer, Spring and
Autumn, publishing the whole work as 'The Seasons' in 1730. He was rewarded
by the gift of sinecure offices from the government and did some further
writing, including, probably, the patriotic lyric, 'Rule, Britannia,' and
also pseudo-classical tragedies; but his only other poem of much importance
is 'The Castle of Indolence' (a subject appropriate to his own
good-natured, easy-going disposition), which appeared just before his
death, in 1748. In it he employs Spenser's stanza, with real skill, but in
a half-jesting fashion which the later eighteenth-century Romanticists also
seem to have thought necessary when they adopted it, apparently as a sort
of apology for reviving so old-fashioned a form.
'The Seasons' was received with enthusiasm not only in England but in
France and Germany, and it gave an impulse for the writing of descriptive
poetry which lasted for a generation; but Thomson's romantic achievement,
though important, is tentative and incomplete, like that of all beginners.
He described Nature from full and sympathetic first-hand observation, but
there is still a certain stiffness about his manner, very different from
the intimate and confident familiarity and power of spiritual