"He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve— He hath a cushion plump: 520 It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak-stump. "The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk, 'Why, this is strange, I trow! Where are those lights so many and fair, 525 16.6 Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit said 'And they answered not our cheer! The planks look warped! and see those sails, I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were "Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; 530 approacheth the ship with wonder. The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat. "Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, 550 Which sky and ocean smote, Like one that hath been seven days drowned "What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there : 580 585 590 And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land, Since the Romantic revival reached its climax with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott, in the new poetry of the early nineteenth century, the changes of its fashion have been comparatively insignificant; whatever variations of mood and treatment exist are due rather to the dis tinctive temperaments of individual poets than to any marked divergence of poetic "tendencies or "schools." There is, however, sufficient kinship between certain poets of the first quarter of the century to justify the heading of this sketch. As we have seen, Coleridge and Wordsworth were early attracted by an enthusiasm for the French Revolution and for the spirit of freedom and equality which it seemed to breathe. But these poets were soon turned from their inclination by the violence which accompanied the Revolution, and by a profound disappointment in the results of the struggle. It was reserved for two later writers, BYRON and SHELLEY, to divine and express the poetic significance of this revolutionary spirit. These young men were poets of brilliant genius and of independent spirit. Both were devoted lovers of liberty, and both carried their love of liberty so far as to be convinced of the necessity of breaking away from the traditions - and from what they regarded as the unnatural restraints of organized society. To be sure, their distinctive differences of character were as marked as their points of likeness. Byron was a man of ungoverned passions, animal enthusiasms, tremendous egotism, cynical and, sometimes, pessimistic temperament. Shelley, on the other hand, was averse to sensual indulgence and generous to a fault; he seemed rather a dweller in some ethereal world than a creature of this earth. As a writer, Byron was naturally glorious in rhetoric but hasty and careless in composition; charged with intellectual force, but deficient in imagination and poetic earnestness: while Shelley was a dreamer, imaginative, unpractical, but an exquisite artist, a poet in every fibre. Yet, in spite of these differences in character and art, each was, in his own way, a poet of radicalism or revolt. GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824) Of all English poets none was, from the first, greeted with such unstinted and universal applause as Lord Byron. Unlike Keats or Wordsworth or Browning, whose growth into popular favor was slow, Byron achieved that favor almost at a single leap. As he himself says, after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, "I awoke to find myself famous." His poems were received abroad even more enthusiastically than at home. Taine, the great French critic, declares that “all styles appear dull beside his," and that “he is so great that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country than from all the rest combined"; while Goethe, the German poet and critic, has said that the English "can show no poet who is to be compared with him." Byron's influence over the literature of foreign nations has been |