The Prefaces of Wordsworth and the kindred comments and remarks of Coleridge were not, it is hardly necessary to say, in themselves powerful enough to effect an instant and complete revolution in poetical theory and practice. But it was all to the good that inspired craftsmen were at last beginning to worry themselves about the nature and quality of the material which they had to mould and fashion and combine into poetry; still more important was it that they were soon to have the powerful aid of fellow-workers like Shelley and Keats, whose practice was to reveal the magic lurking in words and phrases, so arranged and combined as to set them reverberating in the depths of our sensibility. And, on the side of form at least, this is the distinctively Romantic achievement; the æsthetic possibilities and potentialities of the whole of our language, past and present, were entrancingly revealed and magnificently exemplified; new and inexhaustible mines of poetical word-power were thus opened up, and the narrow and conventional limits of the diction within which the majority of the eighteenth century poets had “tallied” their verses were transcended and swept away. FOOTNOTES [1] A brief summary, which is here utilized, is given by Spingarn, “Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century,” I, Intro. xxxvi, foll. (Oxford, 1908). [2] _Vide_ Spingarn, _op. cit._, _Intro._ XXXVI-XLVIII; and also Robertson, “Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the XVIIIth Century” (Cambridge, 1924), an attempt “to show that the Movement which led to the dethronement of Reason, in favour of the Imagination, chief arbiter in poetic creation, and which culminated with Goethe and Schiller in Germany and the Romantic Revival in England, is to be put to the credit not of ourselves, but of Italy, who thus played again that pioneer rôle which she had already played in the sixteenth century.” [3] Spingarn, _op. cit._, II, p. 118. [4] _Ibid._, II, p. 310. [5] _Ibid._, II, p. 273. [6] “Apology for Heroic Poetry”: “Essays of John Dryden,” ed. W. P. Ker (1909), Vol. I, p. 190. [7] “There appears in every part of his [Horace’s] diction, or (to speak English) in all his expressions, a kind of noble and bold purity.”—_Ibid._, p. 266. [8] “Lives”: Dryden, ed. G. B. Hill (1905), Vol. I, p. 420; and cp. Goldsmith, “Poetry Distinguished from other Writing” (Miscellaneous Works), 1821, Vol. IV, p. 381 foll. [9] “Letters” (To R. West), 1742, ed. Tovey (1900); Vol. II, pp. 97-8. [10] Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. I, pp. 17-8. [11] _Ibid._, pp. 188 foll. [12] Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 234. [13] Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” was later to express this tersely enough: “Words tarnished, by passing through the mouths of the vulgar, are laid aside as inelegant and obsolete”—”Conjectures on Original Composition,” 1759 (“English Critical Essays,” Oxford, 1922, p. 320). [14] Pope’s Works, ed. Courthope and Elwin: “Life,” Vol. V, p. 69.