The love for mountains and wild nature is of recent growth.  One writer in the seventeenth century considered the Alps as so much rubbish swept together by the broom of nature to clear the plains of Italy.  A seventeenth century traveler thought the Welsh mountains better than the Alps because the former would pasture goats.  Dr. Johnson asked, “Who can like the Highlands?” The influence of the romantic movement developed the love for wild scenery, which is so conspicuous in Wordsworth and Byron.

This age surpasses even the Elizabethan in endowing Nature with a conscious soul, capable of bringing a message of solace and companionship.  The greatest romantic poet of nature thus expresses his creed:—­

“...Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy."[7]

The Victory of Romanticism.—­We have traced in the preceding age the beginnings of the romantic movement.  Its ascendancy over classical rules was complete in the period between 1780 and the Victorian age.  The romantic victory brought to literature more imagination, greater individuality, deeper feeling, a less artificial form of expression, and an added sense for the appreciation of the beauties of nature and their spiritual significance.

Swinburne says that the new poetic school, “usually registered as Wordsworthian,” was “actually founded at midnight by William Blake (1757-1827) and fortified at sunrise by William Wordsworth.”  These lines from Blake’s To the Evening Star (1783) may be given to support this statement:—­

  “Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening,
       * * * * *
  Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest the
  Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
  On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
  In timely sleep.  Let thy West Wind sleep on
    The lake.”

We may note in these lines the absence of the classical couplet, the fact that the end of the lines necessitates no halt in thought, and a unique sympathetic touch in the lines referring to the flower and the wind.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1793) show not only the new feeling toward nature, but also a broader sympathy with children and with all suffering creatures.  The chimney sweeper, the lost child, and even the sick rose are remembered in his verse.  In his poem, The Schoolboy, he enters as sympathetically as Shakespeare into the heart of the boy on his way to school, when he hears the call of the uncaged birds and the fields.

These two lines express an oft-recurring idea in Blake’s mystical romantic verse:—­

  “The land of dreams is better far,
  Above the light of the morning star.”

The volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798), the joint work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, marks the complete victory of the romantic movement.