ted sources of revived Romance, and
have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other
great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the
demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was
wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public
taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they
knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had
existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague
desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the
weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged
to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth
to _Faust_.

The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and
sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind
of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first
conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive
enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon
of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its
beginnings, was crowded with "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy."
He was a boy at the time of England's greatest naval glory, but he thinks
more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the
forest, says Keats,

He would swear, for all his oaks
Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas.

His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is
almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.

By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the
Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful
death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world.
The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris
before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers:

So with this earthly paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be,
Whose ravening monsters mighty men must s