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For most people in Victorian Britain, Germany was a land of dark forests, romantic castles, and music boxes. The majority of the public was not yet fully aware of the controversial theories of German philosophers and biblical critics, but out of Germany had come a phenomenon that pervaded 19th-century culture: Romanticism.

Romanticism began in the 1780s and 90s as a reaction against the rationalistic universe of the Enlightenment. The German Romantic poet Novalis complained that the Enlightenment thinkers "were tirelessly busy cleaning the poetry off Nature, the earth, the human soul, and the branches of learning—obliterating every trace of the holy, discrediting by sarcasm the memory of all ennobling events and persons, and stripping the world of all colorful ornament."

Rather than being a movement with a common code of beliefs, Romanticism was a mood, a way of looking at the world, a broad range of common concerns about how to understand knowledge and art. What unified all these new ideas was a fundamental shift in the climate of feeling and in attitudes toward emotion. Despite its secular manifestations, Romanticism in both Germany and England was primarily a religious phenomenon—a whole new way of understanding religious experience.

The Evangelical Revival of the 18th century prepared the way for this transformation in England. (Its roots, in turn, were in German Pietism, one of several factors that set the stage for Romanticism in that country.) In reaction against the calm and pious rationality of the Church of England, John and Charles Wesley helped recover the lost emotional dimension of Christian faith. "Our souls o'erflow with pure delight," wrote Charles. It is significant that, for him, this delight in response to God took the form of hymns—poetry. The proclamation that "joy" was at the heart of creativity foreshadowed the Romantic sensibility that would soon envelop the country.

"For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," said William Wordsworth, the writer most responsible for changing the climate of feeling in the first half of the 19th century. He did not merely assert the value of feeling—he showed it as a poet. After Wordsworth's death, Matthew Arnold lamented, "But who, ah who, will make us feel?"

Known today in popular circles for such lines as "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky" and "I wandered lonely as a cloud," Wordsworth was for many Victorians preeminently a religious poet. He gave them an assurance of the overriding unity and wholeness in God's creation that was lacking in a society passing through rapid social change. His poetry showed people once again how to feel a kinship with nature. Many Victorians received from it what they most wanted: a sense of belonging that could integrate head and heart. That truth could be tested "on the pulses" (in the words of another Romantic poet, John Keats) mattered to them quite as much as that it could be intellectually demonstrated.

Though some worried that Wordsworth came dangerously close to worshiping nature, there was always a tension in his writing between a love for the natural world itself and a longing for what lay beyond nature, a joy beyond human grasp—"something evermore about to be." George MacDonald was perhaps the first Victorian critic to point out that this tension mirrored the classic Christian paradox of God as both immanent in nature and transcendent over and beyond it. He called Wordsworth's point of view "Christian pantheism."

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