“The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite.”

This same passion for the “sounding cataract” and the “tall rock,” this appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth’s boyhood to Macpherson’s Ossian, a book which whether it be completely fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the romantic movement.

The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a more important literary event—­the publication of Bishop Percy’s edition of the ballads in the Percy folio—­the Reliques of Ancient Poetry.  Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and plainness of his originals.  Perhaps we should not blame him.  Sir Walter Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy, and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake?  But it is more important to observe that when Percy’s reliques came to have their influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on which he grafted them.  Chatterton’s Rowley Poems, which in many places seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads themselves.  None the less, whatever its fault, Percy’s collection gave its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not only directly, but through Burger’s imitation of it; it began the modern study and love of the ballad which has given us Sister Helen, the White Ship and the Lady of Shalott.

But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous of fashion or style.  It meant certain fundamental changes in human outlook.  In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of thought, seems to become more alive and alert.  It is more sensitive to fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference.  Outward objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of the human spirit.  Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of Greece—­all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic joy.  The impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were classed as romantic, as modes of escape