's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus."

(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)

"Ah dismal soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
It's gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue
Bar'd its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphem'd the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!"

It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them
as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope.
In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles's strictures
on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks,
"Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid?
Is it Milton's? Is it Dryden's? Is it any one's except Pope's
and Goldsmith's, of which ALL is good?"

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow
which, as I have said, set in about the middle of
the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse
from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all,
more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion,
the French revolution, which stirred men's souls to their
deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties,
and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas
"on man, on nature, and on human life", which have since
so vitalized English poetry. *

--
* "The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times,
reacted upon the human intellect, and FORCED men into meditation.
Their own nature was held up before them in a sterner form.
They were compelled to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossal
than is brought forward in the tr