A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

E-text prepared by Al Haines
Author of A Suburban Pastoral , The Ways of Yale , etc.
New York Henry Holt and Company
1918
My love dwelt in a Northern land. A grey tower in a forest green Was hers, and far on either hand The long wash of the waves was seen, And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, The woven forest boughs between.
And through the silver Northern light The sunset slowly died away, And herds of strange deer, lily-white, Stole forth among the branches grey; About the coming of the light, They fled like ghosts before the day.
I know not if the forest green Still girdles round that castle grey; I know not if the boughs between The white deer vanish ere the day; Above my love the grass is green, My heart is colder than the clay.
The present volume is a sequel to A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the footnotes to Volume I. are to that work. The difficulties of this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an 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 employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all educated readers.
As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my definition of romanticism . But every writer has a right to make his own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not written a history of the liberal movement in English literature ; nor of the renaissance 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 the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, to any of those more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.