ABSTRACT
Wordsworth, Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (3rd edition, 1822); New European Magazine, I (Dec. 1822) 490–497. The reviewer, a Cambridgebred clergyman of twenty-four (pp. 490–491), uses and reuses the adjective “romantic,” always with favorable connotations. A generation earlier the work implied either a certain foolishness or at least a distance from the serious business of life. Now has arrived the generation of men who grew up reading the “romantic” poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Byron and who decided they liked it.
