THE VICTORIAN AGE (1) Had it not been that with two exceptions all the poets of the Romantic Revival died early, it might be more difficult to draw a line between their school and that of their successors than it is.

As it happened, the only poet who survived and wrote was Wordsworth, the oldest of them all.

For long before his death he did nothing that had one touch of the fire and beauty of his earlier work.

The respect he began, after a lifetime of neglect, to receive in the years immediately before his death, was paid not to the conservative laureate of 1848, but to the revolutionary in art and politics of fifty years before.

He had lived on long after his work was done "To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost That blamed the living man." All the others, Keats, Shelley, Byron were dead before 1830, and the problem which might have confronted us had they lived, of adult work running counter to the tendencies and ideals of youth, does not exist for us.