Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven.

The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered, that literature must reflect all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its own fancy in its own way.  We have already noted this characteristic in the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, who followed their own genius in opposition to all the laws of the critics.  In Coleridge we see this independence expressed in “Kubla Khan” and “The Ancient Mariner,” two dream pictures, one of the populous Orient, the other of the lonely sea.  In Wordsworth this literary independence led him inward to the heart of common things.  Following his own instinct, as Shakespeare does, he too

    Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

And so, more than any other writer of the age, he invests the common life of nature, and the souls of common men and women, with glorious significance.  These two poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the romantic genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audiences.

The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of poetry.  The previous century, with its practical outlook on life, was largely one of prose; but now, as in the Elizabethan Age, the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing.  The glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and Southey.  Of its prose works, those of Scott alone have attained a very wide reading, though the essays of Charles Lamb and the novels of Jane Austen have slowly won for their authors a secure place in the history of our literature.  Coleridge and Southey (who with Wordsworth form the trio of so-called Lake Poets) wrote far more prose than poetry; and Southey’s prose is much better than his verse.  It was characteristic of the spirit of this age, so different from our own, that Southey could say that, in order to earn money, he wrote in verse “what would otherwise have been better written in prose.”

It was during this period that woman assumed, for the first time, an important place in our literature.  Probably the chief reason for this interesting phenomenon lies in the fact that woman was for the first time given some slight chance of education, of entering into the intellectual life of the race; and as is always the case when woman is given anything like a fair opportunity she responded magnificently.  A secondary reason may be found in the nature of the age itself, which was intensely emotional.  The French Revolution stirred all Europe to its depths, and during the following half century every great movement in literature, as in politics and religion, was characterized by strong emotion; which is all the more noticeable by contrast with the cold, formal, satiric spirit of the early eighteenth century.  As woman is naturally more emotional than man, it may well be that the spirit of this emotional age attracted her, and gave her the opportunity to express herself in literature.