Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust
is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good
deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance.
I have now traced some of the neglected sources of revived Romance, and
have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other
great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the
demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was
wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public
taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they
knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had
existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague
desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the
weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged
to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth
to _Faust_.
The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and
sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind
of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first
conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive
enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon
of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its
beginnings, was crowded with "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy.


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