Excerpt from The Early Life of Robert Southey: 1774-1803 Yet there was another cause for failure which might have been sufficient in itself to frustrate any epic that attempted to voice the creed of the deists. To begin with, the return to-nature movement had no traditions, no roots in the real ized past, no legends proper to itself. The revolution in America and more vividly the revolution in France vitalized the creed into a faith, but Napoleon and disillusionment followed so hard upon hope that the idealists were unable ...
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Excerpt from The Early Life of Robert Southey: 1774-1803 Yet there was another cause for failure which might have been sufficient in itself to frustrate any epic that attempted to voice the creed of the deists. To begin with, the return to-nature movement had no traditions, no roots in the real ized past, no legends proper to itself. The revolution in America and more vividly the revolution in France vitalized the creed into a faith, but Napoleon and disillusionment followed so hard upon hope that the idealists were unable for long to find even in the present any series of momentous events to sanction their ideals. The effect upon Words worth was to drive him out of the current of life into eddy ing mysticism, and to confine his strictly intellectual activity chiefly to a struggle for reform in the style and subjects of poetry. The effect upon Southey was not so Simple, nor his effort so limited. Engaging in similar but even wider experimentation in poetry, he attempted to find a great story in which to embodv his ideals, but sought for it, not in the life of the disappointing present, nor of the con ventionally familiar past, but in the new world which travel and Inquiry were opening up to the imagination. The error was fatal for the epic poet, because this new world was too little known to be believed in as a sanction for faith, and was too soon found to be a far different world from the one he represented. Here the fundamental weak ness of the religion of nature betrayed its own apostles; they fortified their ideals by facts which they pretended to observe but blinked. We have forgiven Wordsworth'sbad science; we have had no reason to forgive Southey's' bad history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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