There exists a natural and almost inevitable affinity between the Romantic and the pastoral, what in good Romantic terminology might be called a Wahlverwandschaft. Romanticism might be sickness, as Goethe said, but pastoral was its balm. Romanticism was frenzy, and pastoral was peace. It was the disruptive force of the French Revolution, said Hazlitt, that stirred English poetry into Romanticism and moulded its character:

Above all, Romanticism was a convulsive response to a growing sense of perplexity and confusion with regard to received assumptions of social order, religious assurance, and economic possibility. Against this expanding complexity, pastoral proffered the vision of a simpler existence. It had muted since its Theocritan origins the eternal hurly-burly of city and court (the ‘court news’ of which ‘poor rogues’ talk has always been a matter of ‘Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out’).