Coleridge’s contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious.  Weighed against the imposing array of Scott’s romances in prose and verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the scales to balance a handful of silver dollars.  He stands for so much in the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual history.  His blossoming time was short at the best, and ended practically with the century.  After his return from Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little verse of any importance beyond the second part of “Christabel” (written in 1800, published in 1816).  His creative impulse failed him, and he became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and literary criticism.

It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge’s German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in the romantic movement.  Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic restoration—­Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the “high priest of Romanticism.” [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth.  Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in “Joan of Arc” (1799), “Madoc” (1805), and “Roderick the Goth” (1814); not to speak of translations like “Amadis of Gaul,” “Palmerin of England,” and “The Chronicle of the Cid.”  But these were not due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott.  They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all descriptions.  Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original inspiration, and represents nothing in particular.  Wordsworth again, though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets as our romantic school par excellence. “‘Lake School’ is a name, but no designation.  This was felt in England, where many critics have accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained