with my whole soul.”  There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the “Essay on Man” than in the “Excursion”; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the “Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard”?  To the sneer that Pope is only the “poet of reason” Byron replies that he will undertake to find more lines teeming with imagination in Pope than in any two living poets.  “In the mean time,” he asks, “what have we got instead? . . .  The Lake school,” and “a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself.”  He prophesies that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is not in harmony with his principles, and says; “I told Moore not very long ago, ‘We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.’” In the first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in much the same way.  He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had “raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture”; and who were “not contented with their own grotesque edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever.  I shall be told that amongst those I have been (or it may be still am) conspicuous—­true, and I am ashamed of it.  I have been amongst the builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor.”  “Neither time nor distance nor grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.  The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps he may be the consolation of my age.  His poetry is the Book of Life.” [16]

Strange language this from the author of “Childe Harold” and “The Corsair”!  But the very extravagance of Byron’s claims for Pope makes it plain that he was pleading a lost cause.  When Warton issued the first volume of his “Essay on Pope,” it was easy for leaders of literary opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of the new school.  But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was already accomplished.  The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron the laudator temporis acti.  The victory remained with Bowles, not because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and changed probably once and for all.[17]

Coleridge’s four contributions to the “Lyrical Ballads” included his masterpiece, “The Ancient Mariner.”  This is the high-water mark of romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without full examination.  As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven “fyts” or parts, and descends from that “Bible of the romantic reformation,” Bishop Percy’s “Reliques.”  The verse is the common ballad stanza—­eights and sixes—­enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and alliteration: