Historical Summary.  Literary Characteristics of the Age.  The Poets of
Romanticism.  William Wordsworth.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Robert Southey. 
Walter Scott.  Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley.  John Keats.  Prose Writers of the
Romantic Period.  Charles Lamb.  Thomas De Quincey.  Jane Austen.  Walter
Savage Landor.  Summary.  Bibliography.  Questions.  Chronology.

CHAPTER XI.  THE VICTORIAN AGE

Historical Summary.  Literary Characteristics.  Poets of the Victorian Age. 
Alfred Tennyson.  Robert Browning.  Minor Poets of the Victorian Age. 
Elizabeth Barrett.  Rossetti.  Morris.  Swinburne.  Novelists of the Victorian
Age.  Charles Dickens.  William Makepeace Thackeray.  George Eliot.  Minor
Novelists of the Victorian Age.  Charles Reade.  Anthony Trollope.  Charlotte
Bronte.  Bulwer Lytton.  Charles Kingsley.  Mrs. Gaskell.  Blackmore.  Meredith. 
Hardy.  Stevenson.  Essayists of the Victorian Age.  Macaulay.  Carlyle. 
Ruskin.  Matthew Arnold.  Newman.  The Spirit of Modern Literature.  Summary. 
Bibliography.  Questions.  Chronology.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

* * * * *

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION—­THE MEANING OF LITERATURE

Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede. 
Chaucer’s Truth
On, on, you noblest English, ... 
Follow your spirit. 
Shakespeare’s Henry V

The shell and the book.  A child and a man were one day walking on the seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear.  Suddenly he heard sounds,—­strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home.  The child’s face filled with wonder as he listened.  Here in the little shell, apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to its mystery and music.  Then came the man, explaining that the child heard nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes.  It was not a new world, but only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child’s wonder.

Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description.  Let a little song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment, at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that it seems a place of dreams and magic.  To enter and enjoy this new world, to love good books for their own sake,