[Footnote: _Preludes_.]
The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however,
was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not
intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature
More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist.
Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote:
See _Childe Harold_.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See _Epipsychidion_.] too,
were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting
nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's
life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows. [Footnote: See
_Tintern Abbey_, _Ode on Intimations of Immortality,_ and _The
Prelude_.]
Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him
to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to
the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic
solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run
its course.
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