Theodore WattsDunton Author:James Douglas Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter I THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER " ' The renascence of wonder,' to employ Mr. Watts-Dunton's appellation for what he justly considers the most striking a... more »nd significant feature in the great romantic revival which has transformed literature, is proclaimed by this very appellation not to be the achievement of any one innovator, but a general reawakening of mankind to a perception that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy."—Dr. R. Garnett: Monograph on Coleridge. UNDOUBTEDLY the greatest philosophical generalization of our time is expressed in the four words, ' The Renascence of Wonder.' They suggest that great spiritual theory of the universe which, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton, is bound to follow the wave of materialism that set in after the publication of Darwin's great book. This phrase, which I first became familiar with in his ' Encyclopaedia Britannica' article on Rossetti, seems really to have been used first in ' Aylwin.' The story seems originally to have been called ' The Renascence of Wonder,' but the title was abandoned because the writer believed that an un- suggestive name, such as that of the autobiographer, was better from the practical point of view. For the knowledge of this I am indebted to Mr. Hake, who says :— " During the time that Mr. Swinburne was living in Great James Street, several of his friends had chambers in the same street, and among them were my late father, Dr. Gordon Hake—Rossetti's friend and physician—Mr. Watts-Dunton and myself. Mr. Watts- Dunton, as is well known, was a brilliant raconteur long before he became famous as a writer. I have heard him tell scores of stories full of plot and character that have never appeared in print. On a certain occasion he was suffering from one of ...« less