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But though the two young writers are ostensibly concerned with children, they do not only mean children: when Coleridge invokes the imagination of a child, he is yearning for its power for himself. The child might be father to the man, as Wordsworth famously wrote in his ode, 'Intimations of Immortality', but that paternity was, ideally, internal and present and active: the Romantics were the first to conceive of the Inner Child, and to yearn to reinstate the child's sway over the adult. They expressed nostalgia for childhood; but even more acutely, they longed for childlikeness to endure in order to keep their faculties quick and fertile. And between them, Charles Lamb and Coleridge pioneered the idea of the crossover text, the work of fantasy that appeals across generations, such as 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', or, as it would turn out, Tales from Shakespeare.
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