Adam Nicolson

In the footsteps of the Romantic poets

Fiona Sampson conjures many heroes of Romanticism in her walks around England in pursuit of the ‘spirit of beauty’

‘The Rising of the Skylark’, by Samuel Palmer. [Getty Images]

Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with the departed dead’, found nothing in reply. Nothing reverberated. The ghosts were silent. But he felt something else non-human: the springtime breezes bringing a sense of the marvellousness of life itself.

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