How to think that the love of past is an important feature of English romanticism

“To scott”, says Compton-Rickett “the appeal of a landscape lay in its historic associations: Keats in its legendary inspiration.”

He does not attribute, like Wordsworth, a soul and a life to Nature, but he peoples her with the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology. Every tree in his poetry comes to have its own Dryad, every wood its own Fauns and Satyrs, and every river and lake its own Nymphs. What he says of the ancient Greeks is equally applicable to him:

“When holy were the haunted forest boughs

Holy the air, the water and the fire”.

As his friend Leigh Hunt once said, “He never beheld an oak tree without seeing a Dryad on it”

A love of the past, especially of the remote and mysterious middle Ages, is an important feature of English romanticism. Dissatisfied with the present, the real and the actual, the romantics turned back to the middle Ages in search of inspiration and themes.

Result of this medieval revival in prose fiction was the Gothic novel, and about the same eats influence became equally conspicuous in poetry.