descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original
inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again,
though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century
tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and
the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to
define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets
as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but
no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have
accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the
members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their
personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together,
and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a
strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the
aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle
against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be
various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry
Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by
bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or
dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and
zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us
abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in
poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with
their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These
were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such
changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person,
nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural
unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men,
when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated