The classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of Othello; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much value and power as the intellect, encouraged their expression.  Sometimes this tendency was carried to an extreme, both in fiction and in the sentimental drama; but it was necessary for romanticism to call attention to the fact that great literature cannot neglect the world of feeling.

Early Romantic Influences.—­The reader and imitators of the great romantic poet, Edmund Spenser, were growing in number.  Previous to 1750, there was only one eighteenth-century edition of Spenser’s works published in England.  In 1758 three editions of the Faerie Queene appeared and charmed readers with the romantic enchantment of bowers, streams, dark forests, and adventures of heroic knights.

James Thomson (1700-1748), a Scotch poet, used the characteristic Spenserian form and subject matter for his romantic poem, The Castle of Indolence (1748).  He placed his castle in “Spenser land":—­

  “A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,
    Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
  And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
    Forever flushing round a summer sky.”

The influence of Shakespeare increased.  In 1741 the great actor David Garrick captivated London by his presentation of Shakespeare’s plays.

Milton’s poetry, especially his Il Penseroso, with its individual expression of melancholy, its studious spirit, “commercing with the skies and bringing all Heaven before the eyes,” left a strong impress on the romantic spirit of the age.  The subject matter of his Paradise Lost satisfied the romantic requirement for strangeness and strong feeling.  In the form of his verse, James Thomson shows the influence of Milton as well as of Spencer.  Thomson’s greatest achievement is The Seasons (1730), a romantic poem, written in Miltonic blank verse.  He takes us where—­

  “The hawthorn whitens; and the juicy groves
  Put forth their buds.”

He was one of the earliest poets to place Nature in the foreground, to make her the chief actor.  He reverses what had been the usual poetic attitude and makes his lovers, shepherds, and harvesters serve largely as a background for the reflection of her moods instead of their own.  The spring shower, the gusts sweeping over fields of corn, the sky saddened with the gathering storm of snow, are the very fabric of his verse.  Unlike Wordsworth, Thomson had not sufficient genius to invest Nature with an intelligent, loving, companionable soul; but his pictures of her were sufficiently novel and attractive to cause such a classicist and lover of the town as Dr. Samuel Johnson to say:—­

  “The reader of The Seasons wonders that he never saw before what
  Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson
  impresses.”