There began to arise about this time a race of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight.

They were a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret.

They climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods.

Numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams.

Ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell.