'There is a science of the aspects of things, as well as of their nature' - if this dictum of Ruskin is central to his aims in Modern Painters it points also to the remarkable affinity of creative effort to record and to interpret the natural world that links him with Coleridge at the beginning and with Hopkins in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the three writers stand in no simple relation of mere sequence and in this essay, which continues the exploration of the Romantic and Victorian imagination begun in her previous book, The Central Self, Dr Ball follows the complex interrelationships, clash and resolution of ideas by which a profound shift in nineteenth-century creative vision was effected. The notebooks and diaries of the three writers together with the literary work that grew out of or paralleled this material form the foundation for this illuminating essay, but Dr Ball's enquiry is necessarily wide-ranging and branches into such wider questions as the whole critical theory of the pathetic fallacy and the influence on Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins of contemporary science and the visual arts.

Dr Ball offers an analysis and evaluation of a number of Victorian long poems and groups of lyrics which trace the course of close personal relationships. Her argument is that whereas Romantic treatment of such material was limited, the Victorian poets not only made this emotional territory their own but explored it with vigour, variety and enterprise, and great technical resource. This is apparent, as Dr Ball shows, whether the poets concern themselves with crises such as loss through death - In Memoriam, Patmore's odes of bereavement - or breakdown - Modern Love, Maud, James Lee's Wife - or whether they portray the intricate flux of mutual attraction and courtship, as in Amours de Voyage, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and The Angel in the House. The Heart's Events brings out strongly the experimental vitality and range of Victorian poetry and, in particular, its sensitive imaginative response to the subtleties of psychological time and change in its records of the inner histories of love.

In this closely argued book Dr Ball is concerned to analyse the imaginative process of self-understanding which emerged as a characteristic feature of English Romantic poetry and, acquiring fresh creative force in the Victorian period, has been transmitted to our own times as a determining principle of the contemporary imagination. Dr Ball relates her discussion to the distinction between the poet speaking directly in his own voice and the impulse to dramatised utterance - the two modes of poetic expression conveniently summed up in Keats's contrasting terms 'egotistical sublime' and 'chameleon'. She shows how these 'polar' tendencies co-exist fruitfully in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats and from this standpoint supplies a coherent appreciation of the little-regarded plays written by these poets. Turning to Victorian critics and poets Dr Ball considers how the Romantic inheritance fared at their hands. She sees in the poets, notably Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, and Hopkins, a vital link by which the Romantic commitment to the agency of self-consciousness has been carried forward to the twentieth century and concludes with a brief sketch of the creative role of self-exploration in T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats.