A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

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age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to em

nce of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use of romantic in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to

definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Sta?l was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the

tal realist, and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a link in

bject. It is scarcely necessary to add that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose wo

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