is that I yearn to look upon!" No farcical romance of the nursery
shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the
intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an
older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words,
gave it in its day a serious importance at which our own age can
merely marvel. It brings no historical conviction; it is altogether
free from such conventional limits as Time and Space. Stripped of its
dreamy diction, there is even a tropical residue of sensuousness, to
which the English language is prone to give a plainer name. It
develops into a fantastic _mélange_ which no American mind can
possibly reckon with; what its effect would be upon a person relegated
to reading it in close confinement, it would not be safe to assert,
but it is quite certain that "this way madness lies."

To generalize about the Romantic movement, may seem about as practical
as to attempt to make a trigonometrical survey of the Kingdom of
Dreams. No epoch in all literary history is so hopelessly entangled in
the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most
complex sources. To deal with the facts of classic art, which is
concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple
matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school
which waged war upon "the deadliness of ascertained facts" and
immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be. Its
most authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of
sentimental matter in fantastic form." A more elaborated authoritative
definition is given in the first volume of the _Athenæum_:

"Romantic poetry is a progressive universal-poetry. Its aim is not
merely to reunite all the dispersed classes of poetry, and to place
poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric; it aims and ought to aim