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[35] Our great wealth, indeed, continued to advance till the catastrophe of 1914. But there was a shadow of apprehension over everything—'never glad confident morning again.'

Let us now turn to the intellectual and spiritual movements of the reign. The Romanticist revolution was complete, in a sense, before 1825. It was a European, not only an English movement, and perhaps it was not less potent in France than in Germany and England, though in accordance with the genius and traditions of that nation it took very different forms. In England it inspired verse more than prose, though we must not forget Scott's novels. It produced a galaxy of great poetry during the Great War, and added another immortal glory to that age of heroic struggle. By a strange chance, nearly all the great poets of the war-period died young. Wordsworth alone was left, and he was spared to reap in a barren old age the honours which he had earned and not received between 1798 and 1820. For about fifteen years there was an interregnum 3—2