ABSTRACT
Rossetti and Morris may have remained unaware of the importance of this flank movement by Swinburne, and indeed its importance was not clear till some twenty- five or thirty years later, but it did a good deal, in time, to diminish the isolation of the Victorian Romantics, to encourage a view of them according to which they, simply as Romantics had great though remote and imperfectly recognized allies in European literature. With the acclimatization of exotics, they began to look less alien. Then Swinburne provided that which English Romanticism had lacked since the death of Shelley, an extravagant lyrical passion for liberty, a vehement sympathy with liberty-seeking movements throughout the world. On the other hand, it must be urged that, at any rate from 1867, when Swinburne began to contribute critical prose to the Fortnightly Review, he did more than anyone else to prepare the fittest part of the public for appreciation of the work of the group.
