4.  Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent understanding of the human heart.  Not to intellect or to science does the heart unlock its treasures, but rather to the touch of a sympathetic nature; and things that are hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed unto children.  Pope had no appreciable humanity; Swift’s work is a frightful satire; Addison delighted polite society, but had no message for plain people; while even Johnson, with all his kindness, had no feeling for men in the mass, but supported Sir Robert Walpole in his policy of letting evils alone until forced by a revolution to take notice of humanity’s appeal.  With the romantic revival all this was changed.  While Howard was working heroically for prison reform, and Wilberforce for the liberation of the slaves, Gray wrote his “short and simple annals of the poor,” and Goldsmith his Deserted Village, and Cowper sang,

                     My ear is pained,
    My soul is sick with every day’s report
    Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. 
    There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart,
    It does not feel for man.[201]

This sympathy for the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger and stronger till it culminated in “Bobby” Burns, who, more than any other writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart.

5.  The romantic movement was the expression of individual genius rather than of established rules.  In consequence, the literature of the revival is as varied as the characters and moods of the different writers.  When we read Pope, for instance, we have a general impression of sameness, as if all his polished poems were made in the same machine; but in the work of the best romanticists there is endless variety.  To read them is like passing through a new village, meeting a score of different human types, and finding in each one something to love or to remember.  Nature and the heart of man are as new as if we had never studied them.  Hence, in reading the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us deeply, as if we had never seen it before.

6.  The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not altogether unguided.  Strictly speaking, there is no new movement either in history or in literature; each grows out of some good thing which has preceded it, and looks back with reverence to past masters.  Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and we can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.[202]