Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/155

Rh Aspasia," "Pentameron," and "Citation of Shakespeare." But Landor, with the fieriest personal temper conceivable, was, like Alfieri, though of a totally different school, another being when at work, an artist to his fingers' ends. So was Coleridge at times, when he shook himself like Samson: not the subjective brother-in-arms of Wordsworth, but the Coleridge of the imagination and haunting melody and sovereign judgment unparalleled in his time,—Coleridge of "The Ancient Mariner," and "Christabel," and "Kubla Khan," whose loss to the highest field of poetic design is something for which one never can quite forgive theology and metaphysics. Of Wordsworth, the real master of the Wordsworth. Victorian self-absorption, I shall speak at another time, with respect to our modern conception of the sympathetic quality of nature. To conclude, the prodigal Georgian school, springing from The Georgian School. a soil that had lain fallow for a hundred years, was devoted as a whole to self-utterance, but magnificently so. Of course a reaction set in, and we now complete the more restrained, scholarly, analytic, artistic Victorian period,—a time, I fully believe, of equally imaginative effort, yet of an effort, as we shall see, that usually has taken, so far as concerns dramatic invention, a direction other than rhythmic.

Meanwhile, Heinrich Heine, of the intermediate generation, and the countryman of Goethe, Heine. began, one might say, where Byron left off. His