The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools.
Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and elaborated itself into fresh forms.

None the less, every author in each of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand his direct relations to the romantic movement.

Rossetti touches it through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied subject-matter.
In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous advance.

The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in men and women.

To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes about them as in such great poems as _Resolution and Independence_, the _Brothers_, or _Michael_, it is as natural objects he treats them, invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the complexities and passions of life as it is lived.