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In my opinion Robert (“Fleshly School”) Buchanan's The Drama of Kings (1871) exerted so strong an influence on Hardy's Dynasts that it deserves to be regarded as the immediate source of that work. The contention would appear to be virginal. The biographies and critical studies of Abercrombie, Blunden, Brennecke, Chakravarty, Chew, Duffin, Florence Emily Hardy, Hedgcock, Holland, McDowall, Rutland, South-worth, Symons, Weber, and Webster provide, in their greatly varying degree, suggestions as to the philosophical and literary background of Hardy's trilogy. None of them, however, suggests any relation between The Dynasts and The Drama of Kings. In fact none of them even mentions the name of Robert Williams Buchanan with the exception of Edmund Blunden, who notes the interesting fact that Buchanan dedicated to Hardy his novel, Come Live with Me and Be My Love. He might also have observed that Buchanan elsewhere devotes a laudatory poem to Hardy and warmly praises “Tom Hardy” in another poem.

Has any English poet of comparable historical interest and intrinsic merit received so small an amount of respectable critical attention as Robert Browning? Now that the nineteenth-century spate of “inspirational” eulogy and exegesis has dwindled to the merest trickle, there is need and opportunity for disinterested re-examination of his work. One result of such a study will be our awareness of a paradox. Though by no means a profound philosopher, Browning was a man of much intellectual subtlety. He was fascinated by the difficulties and ambiguities of thought, its sinuous twistings and turnings and casuistical rationalizations. But his deeply convoluted brain could never dismiss the obligation to satisfy the demands of his healthy and almost boyishly simple heart. On the one hand, the truth was many-sided, relative, shadowy; on the other hand, it was single, absolute, and plain as a pikestaff. Brain-truth was of man; heart-truth was of God. The poet, who must faithfully render all the tangled phenomena of mental life, must also apprehend God's truth and impart it to others.

Admiration for the best qualities of W. H. Hudson it not inconsistent with a lively distaste for Rima, the bird-maiden of Green Mansions. One cannot believe in her as anything. Too avian to be human and too human to be preternatural, too unearthly to be a woman and too womanly to be a bird, she is the most striking example of the truth of Robert Hamilton's statement that the erotic element in Hudson's romances is “quite extraordinarily unconvincing.”

The verse-epistle comprising all but a few sentences of the letter which Keats wrote to John Hamilton Reynolds on March 25, 1818, is a mixture of half-morbid jocularity and half-cynical seriousness. In lines 67–85 Keats tries to explain his strange mood by declaring that he feels the obligation to “philosophize” in poetry, does not yet “dare” to do so, fears that he never will be able to do so, and does not really wish to do so because “It spoils the singing of the Nightingale.” This conflict between “sensation” and “thought” is an old story to students of Keats. It has never been sufficiently emphasized, however, that in the concluding verse-paragraph what really “spoils the singing of the Nightingale” turns out to be not moral philosophy, but natural philosophy of so pessimistic a kind that it forbids any hope of harmonizing the sensuous love of beauty with a helpfully benevolistic view of the universe.

The immediate sources of the English romantic movement are to be found in the sentimentalized puritanism of the eighteenth-century middle class.' Something like a philosophical formulation of the widely pervasive cult of feeling may be abstracted from such mid-eighteenthcentury poets as Henry Needler, James Thomson, David Mallett, Isaac Hawkins Browne, Henry Brooke, Henry Baker, Mark Akenside, John Gilbert Cooper, and James Harris. They sing of a more or less NeoPlatonic Divine Spirit of truth, beauty, and love who has thought the universe into being by an exercise of creative imagination. "Nature" is the universe as permeated by this benignly fecund spirit. The creation is full, complex, and richly variegated; but it is also a perfectly integrated and harmonious whole. Man is a part of the universal harmony. His bosom is full of expansive benevolent impulses akin to those possessed by his Creator. His conduct is regulated by an intuitive spiritual taste, a virtuoso's ability to appreciate the cosmic masterpiece. In all this the influence of Shaftesbury may be seen, but such ideas were so widely diffused toward the close of the seventeenth century that he cannot be regarded as their only begetter.2 Eighteenth-century lay Christianity was so broad and hazy that writers who expressed these views sometimes called themselves Christians. We should call them sentimental deists with pantheistic hankerings. Their creed is not strictly pantheistic, for it dimly recognizes the transcendence as well as the immanence of the divine. But since God is revealed only in nature and in that most godlike part of nature, the

This paper announces no great discovery, but it contains fresh material of interest to students of Coleridge, of David Hartley and the philosophical tradition which he represents, and of Anglo-German literary relations. Our starting-point is lines 35-45 of Religious Musings, where Coleridge declares that the life and death of Christ freed the human soul from the bonds of idolatrous fear:Till of its nobler nature it 'gan feelDim recollections; and thence soared to Hope,Strong to believe whate'er of mystic goodThe Eternal dooms for His immortal sons.From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect LoveAttracted and absorbed: and centered thereGod only to behold, and know, and feel,Till by exclusive consciousness of GodAll self-annihilated it shall makeGod its Identity: God all in all!We and our Father one!1