upon plot, characters, and setting, dominated the immense development of prose fiction up to our own time. Drama After the early eighteenth century the drama steadily declined as a literary form. It was rapidly overshadowed by the novel. In the late eighteenth century David Garrick began a revival of Shakespeare's plays and with Oliver Goldsmith's (1728-1774) She Stoops to Conquer and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's (1751-1816) The Rivals and The School for Scandal, comedy had a brief revival of brilliance. But the interest in drama as a literary form speedily declined again, and farces, melodrama, pantomimes, imitations of Shakespeare, and adaptations from the French satisfied theatergoers until the modern revival of drama after 1880. In 1798, with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), begins definitely a new movement which historians of English literature have agreed to call the "romantic movement." Poetry The new period is marked by a break with the literary ideals which had ruled since 1660. For the adherence to tradition, the regularity, the limitations of literary subjects to those which were socially correct, the strict use of poetic diction, the permanence of the heroic couplet, and all the other literary conventions of the "age of prose and reason," the young writers of the romantic movement urged freedom, novelty, lack of restraint, free choice of material, and above all, complete freedom of the individual to write about life as he saw it without regard to social conventions. All about them the old life was breaking up. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the change in social and industrial life, these made life seem new, vigorous, exciting and free. As Wordsworth said: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!-Oh, times, The new freedom to which, of course, such men as Thomson, Gray, Collins, Blake, and Burns in the eighteenth century had pointed the way, showed itself in the form and subject matter of literature. Wordsworth aimed at writing in "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation"; Coleridge aimed to secure "a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to secure for" supernatural incidents "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." The new poetry wrote about life out of doors, flowers and trees, storms and mountains; about humble, simple people; about the hopes and aspirations of lovers of liberty; about the emotions and experiences of ardent, sensitive souls; about the joys of discovery felt by the lover of art and literature; about old stories drawn from legend, history, and simple religious faith; about the Greek and Roman classics seen in the light of a new day. These things and hundreds of others they felt intensely with a meaning that was new and deeply emotional. Life was illumined by "The light that never was on sea or land;" they heard a new voice, a voice "The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam They explored with a new vision the literature of the past, and with memories of the great poets, could say with Keats: "For I am brimful of the friendliness And faithful Petrarch gloriously crowned." In such an age one naturally expects the greatest variety of literary forms. Once more the sonnet came into its own, beginning with a popularity equaled only by its vogue in the time of Shakespeare. Wordsworth wrote sonnets almost as great in their dignity and power as those of Milton; and John Keats (1795-1821) gave the form an emotional depth and passion which it had never before known. The old themes of love were less cultivated now, and any deep feeling was a proper subject for treatment "Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground." A wide variety of miscellaneous lyrical poetry appears which can hardly be classified. Poets expressed themselves at will, as regard for definite form began to break down and chief attention began to be paid to spontaneity and unconventionality. This miscellaneous lyrical poetry may be conveniently grouped under three heads: the simple lyric, the unrestrained, immediate expression of the poet's overflowing emotion; the lyric which presents not the emotion, but the scene or incident from which the emotion springs; and the reflective lyric, the result of "emotion recollected in tranquillity," containing thought rather than spontaneous emotion. The simple lyric, or song, which in Shakespeare's time had sung itself so beautifully, and which in the eighteenth century had been neglected until the time of Blake and Burns, comes to its own in the work of Scott and Shelley with new subject matter and new music. In such songs as Scott's Waken, lords and ladies gay and A weary lot is thine, fair maid, there is the memory of old Scotch tunes; in such songs as Shelley's Music, when soft voices die, To Night, and A Lament, there is ethereal music, poignant feeling, tender grace, and intense emotion. The lyric of incident is well illustrated by Scott's Jock of Hazeldean and Wordsworth's Three Years She Grew. It is, however, in the reflective lyric that the new creative spirit of the romantic period found itself in fullest power. Wordsworth best describes this kind of writing: "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated, till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." In this spirit the poets of the romantic period wrote lyrics which seem to us to-day works of imperishable beauty. In Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud; in Coleridge's Frost at Midnight; in Shelley's |