These two books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude strength.

The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786.
It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the preceding year.

But it was in Coleridge himself and his close contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed itself.

He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley, twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except Wordsworth.

His genius blossomed early.