In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.
The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more
obvious and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm
among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly
less intense than in France. It was the dawn of a new day; the shackles
were stricken from the slave; all men were free and all men were
brothers, and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar
of the Paris mob. Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_,
Coleridge's _Fall of Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's
revolutionary drama, _Wat Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and
aspirations of the English democracy. In after life, Wordsworth, looking
back regretfully to those years of promise, wrote his poem on the
_French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.
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