ABSTRACT
Victorian Romanticism by, or soon after, 1870 is condemned to death, but with an indefinite reprieve which proved to be long. Rossetti has hardly come completely before the general body of readers as a poet, Swinburne has hardly reached his highest lyrical achievement in the ardent and purified Songs Before Sunrise, when the period of decline begins. He say decline, rather than decadence, because the latter word has too many meanings, some of which cannot be read into the decline till the nineties. In Marston, and still more in Shaughnessy, poetry becomes tenuous not so much through spiritualization as through lack of blood. And Victorian Romanticism ends in a distinguished perversity, in a kind of languid fete galante, as of that earlier Dobsonian entertainment grown complicated, ambiguous, here and there corrupt. The future is with an expanded and courageous Romanticism, and in the inevitable revival the Victorian Romantics will once more have due attention.
