ABSTRACT
T h e literary climate in which the Romantic child developed was prepared in the half-century from Rousseau’s Emile to Wordsworth’s Prelude. His appearance lay in the opposition of two centuries, the eighteenth and nineteenth; in the development of the ‘ cult of sensi bility’ ; in the ‘ revolt’, as J. S. Mill, in his Essay on Coleridge, called it, of the ‘ human mind against the philosophy of the eighteenth cen tury’ ; in die whole movement of the late eighteenth century from Reason to Feeling.
