revolution also saw a religious revival associated with Methodism, and somewhat later and on the other side of the Anglican Establishment, with the Oxford Movement. Yet the very act of turning was a conscious effort; the old implicit acceptance was gone, and could not be recovered.
The poets of the Romantic movement, and their Victorian successors, thus face a problem which had not existed in the age of faith, and had not been examined by the Augustans. The individual in spiritual crisis must now face it alone, and find his way or her way back from the edge of despair. Even God must be sought out.
We find the problem succinctly stated in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," written just across the boundary of the new century, in 1802:
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
The soul can no longer ease its pain by uncomplicated submergence in its own sorrow; it is too self-conscious for that. Nor can it find sustenance in an external faith:
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
On that green light that lingers in the west;
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
In these few lines, Coleridge has summarized the problem with which he, his contemporaries, and his successors had to grapple. In what is probably the most famous of his poems, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," he offers a solution. The world, he proposes in the quote that stands at the head of the poem, has its invisible as well as its visible components. This seems like a restatement of the Nicene Creed, "I believe in all things visible and invisible," but Coleridge finds it impossible to simply look backward. Though the time-frame of the poem is not narrowly defined, it lies at the beginning of the new world rather than the end of the old:
Into that sile...