Tidal stream turbines provide a technically viable means of generating electricity from a sustainable resource; however, economic viability will require the deployment of multiple devices in array formations in a manner analogous to wind farms. This research investigates the effect of the configuration of a tidal turbine array on the hydroenvironmental impacts of the array such as changes in tidal flows and water surface levels.The Shannon Estuary, a highly energetic estuary on the west coast of Ireland with significant potential for tidal current energy extraction, was simulated using a depth integrated 2D hydroenvironmental model, namely DIVAST. The numerical model was modified to incorporate the effects of energy extraction on the tidal regime and a multiple device array was simulated. Three different array configurations were examined with turbine spacings of 0.5, 2 and 5 rotor diameters. The model results demonstrate that energy extraction has an attenuation effect on the currents within the array while flow is accelerated around the array. Water surface elevations are also affected with a reduction in tidal range upstream of the array. The magnitude and extent of the observed impacts are greater for the smallest turbine spacing but were still significant for the larger spacings.

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In his portrait of Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt indicated that cultures as well as individuals were subject to ageing: 'The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements'. 1 This weary assessment of the age's repletion and unoriginality jars with traditional identifications of the Romantic period with youth, vitality, and originality, exemplified by Wordsworth's recollection of the early stages of the French Revolution in The Prelude (1805): 'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven! … the whole earth, / The beauty wore of promise' (x, 692-93, 701-2). 2 Wordsworth's appreciation of early wonders in The Prelude chimes with that of Thomas De Quincey, who associated the experience of understanding the lessons of 'We Are Seven' with 'the precocity of a fourteen-year-old' and Felicia Hemans who hymned 'Youth', 'When not a cloud of sorrow lowers; / When every moment wings its flight, / To waft new joy and new delight' (2-4). 3 If Goethe gave many male Romantic authors a less optimistic archetype for youth in the sorrows of his 'young' Werther, and a writer like Hartley Coleridge discovered that the burdens of being a prodigy far outweighed the delights, it only made youth a more conspicuous theme in Romantic writing.While the popular construction of Romanticism as a movement typified by young rebellious writers who died tragically young may no longer hold sway among scholars, its

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