extravagance of speech, its lively sense of the wonder of heaven and earth.
The ideal beauty of Spenser's poetry, the bombast of Marlowe, the boundless
zest of Shakespeare's historical plays, the romantic love celebrated in
unnumbered lyrics,--all these speak of youth, of springtime, of the joy and
the heroic adventure of human living.

This romantic enthusiasm of Elizabethan poetry and prose may be explained
by the fact that, besides the national impulse, three other inspiring
influences were at work. The first in point of time was the rediscovery of
the classics of Greece and Rome,--beautiful old poems, which were as new to
the Elizabethans as to Keats when he wrote his immortal sonnet, beginning:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold.

The second awakening factor was the widespread interest in nature and the
physical sciences, which spurred many another Elizabethan besides Bacon to
"take all knowledge for his province." This new interest was generally
romantic rather than scientific, was more concerned with marvels, like the
philosopher's stone that would transmute all things to gold, than with the
simple facts of nature. Bacon's chemical changes, which follow the
"instincts" of metals, are almost on a par with those other changes
described in Shakespeare's song of Ariel:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.