There are various other characteristics of Romanticism, but these six—­the protest against the bondage of rules, the return to nature and the human heart, the interest in old sagas and mediaeval romances as suggestive of a heroic age, the sympathy for the toilers of the world, the emphasis upon individual genius, and the return to Milton and the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope and Dryden, for literary models—­are the most noticeable and the most interesting.  Remembering them, we shall better appreciate the work of the following writers who, in varying degree, illustrate the revival of romantic poetry in the eighteenth century.

THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)

    The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
    The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea;
    The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
    And leaves the world to darkness and to me. 
    Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
    And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
    Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
    And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

So begins “the best known poem in the English language,” a poem full of the gentle melancholy which marks all early romantic poetry.  It should be read entire, as a perfect model of its kind.  Not even Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” which it strongly suggests, excels it in beauty and suggestiveness.

LIFE OF GRAY.  The author of the famous “Elegy” is the most scholarly and well-balanced of all the early romantic poets.  In his youth he was a weakling, the only one of twelve children who survived infancy; and his unhappy childhood, the tyranny of his father, and the separation from his loved mother, gave to his whole life the stamp of melancholy which is noticeable in all his poems.  At the famous Eton school and again at Cambridge, he seems to have followed his own scholarly tastes rather than the curriculum, and was shocked, like Gibbon, at the general idleness and aimlessness of university life.  One happy result of his school life was his friendship for Horace Walpole, who took him abroad for a three years’ tour of the Continent.

No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign travel.  Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before, in good weather, he wrote:  “A very troublesome journey....  You cannot imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain.”  Gray crossed the Alps in the beginning of winter, “wrapped in muffs, hoods and masks of beaver, fur boots, and bearskins,” but wrote ecstatically, “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry.”