Richard Homes has written several well-regarded biographies of figures in the English Romantic Movement. He has also written a couple of books about the craft of doing biography. It seems that The Romantic Generation, that group of poets, essayists, dreamers, spinners of fantasies and exquisite chroniclers of the subtlest emotions, were also very interested in Science. In fact, they were more than a little bit blown away by it all, especially by the fact that these advances were taking place in their lifetimes. The book is The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science , 576 p, Pantheon Press. It’s not Lit Crit, but pretty much what the subtitle says. These supersensitive and highly intelligent people were fascinated by the discoveries being made about the natural world, and Nature, after all, was one of the things that obsessed them. A look at the Table of Contents shows that all the Usual Suspects are on deck: Jospeh Banks, the Herschels, the Montgolfier brothers, Humphrey Davy (an amateur poet himself, and not a bad one) and, of course, the Shelleys. In many ways, things were just getting started. Only the overture was playing, but a lot of people guessed that the rest of the show would be terrific, in fact, it would be “awesome”. This is a good book; get hold of it and read it.