Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination.
Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between the visible world and another world which is unseen.

The supernatural which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors, and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and fascination.

There is nothing in earlier English literature to set beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_, and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind.
Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most pervasive and the most important.

Wordsworth speaks for the love that is in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in "Woods and rills; The silence that is in the starry sky, The peace that is among the lonely hills." Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political revolution.

Byron for the swing and roar of the sea.