From Persia to
Paraguay Southey could wander and seek after exotic themes; his days
could be 'passed among the dead'--but neither the classic lands nor
the classic heroes ever seem to have detained him. Walter Scott's
'sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of
heather', as Ruskin says; [Footnote: _Modern Painters_, iii. 317] and
when he came to Rome, his last illness prevented him from any attempt
he might have wished to make to enlarge his field of vision.
Wordsworth was even less far-travelled, and his home-made poetry never
thought of the 'Pagan' and his 'creed outworn', but as a distinct
_pis-aller_ in the way of inspiration. [Footnote: _Sonnet_ 'The world
is too much with us'; cf. _The Excursion_, iv. 851-57.] And again,
though Coleridge has a few magnificent lines about them, he seems to
have even less willingly than Wordsworth hearkened after
The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion.
[Footnote: _The Piccolomini_, II, iv.]
It was to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They
lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the
paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a
considerable change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self-
concentration, England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way
to Europe--and vice versa.
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