I stood on Brocken’s sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills, A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Heavily my way Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore. Actually these pieces are by Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tupper, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that order: but what reader could offhand ascribe them correctly? Who would not give the first to Keats, the second to Wordsworth and stumble over the last four? This extraordinary sameness in poets of such entirely different personal character is due principally to the limitations which ‘spiritual elevation’ in the academic sense imposes: these poets only wrote authentic poetry when off their guard. The sameness is accentuated by the nationalistic element: every poet wrote as an Englishman first, bound by his very use of the language to a policy of increasing the national heritage of song rather than to the development of a strictly personal idiom. He also wrote as a member of a class, the governing class. One of the last surviving rewards of the poet as a privileged member of the community was that, whatever his birth, by writing acceptable poetry he became a gentleman; even in the narrowly aristocratic eighteenth century this tradition obtained. (Even to-day, when literary culture is the only gentility possible to affect.) Stephen Duck, the “Thresher Poet”, whose works pleased George II.’s Queen, was officially confirmed in his gentility by being presented with a country-living as a clergyman. Burns was, for a while at least, given the freedom of smart Edinburgh society and allowed to write familiar epistles to members of the aristocracy. Poetical ideas and poetical technique--the substance of poetical education, in fact--have always been class-institutions, and poets born from the labouring or shop-keeping classes have with very few exceptions tried to elevate themselves by borrowing ideas and techniques to the enjoyment of which they were not born. Even revolutionary ideas are, by a paradox, upper-class ideas, a rebound from excesses of poetical refinement. Burns’ romantic sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier stages could be read as a sign of natural breeding, the gentlemanly radicalism of the literary _jeunesse_. The social gap between the crofters and the gentry was, moreover, not so wide a one in Scotland as in England; and Burns soon learned the trick of drawing-room writing. Keats, not being, like Burns or John Clare, an obvious example of peasant genius, or an aristocrat like Shelley, always had difficulty in discovering his temperamental biases. The son of a tradesman, he could not afford to be politically as radical as those inferior and superior to him in class; though he went with Leigh Hunt as far as he thought it safe. Blake was also a radical: one of the few Englishmen who dared walk about in London wearing a cap of Liberty. But he is a very rare