History is the coming to be of the prevailing idea. Coleridge’s nonfiction is not Romantic because he is the lamp, the source of light and motion, rather the ideas are the lamp. What is compelling in both of these faces of Romanticism is the push from within: the sensibilities that inform the motion of the individual who wanders lonely as a cloud has its analogue in the unfolding idea which transforms the kingdom of Alfred the Great into the parliamentary monarchy of Coleridge’s day.
