bitions are so
unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage
become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not
its meaning in literature. The romantic may not always be "of
imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. To
the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a
reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the classicists, the
romanticists can enjoy _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.
The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. Any
movements that stimulate imaginative activity must give the individual
more points of contact with the part of the world that does not
obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts
of existence that cold intellectual activity can never comprehend.
Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view.

In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed.
Hence, too much repetition may take away a necessary quality from what
was once considered romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when
applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at first
romantic; but much repetition has deprived them of this quality. If an
age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point
of view somewhat different from that of the age immediately preceding.
This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the
manner of its presentation, or in both. An example of the formal
element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of
blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of
the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject
matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.

In the third place, the highest type of romanticism encourages each
author to express himself in an individual way, to color the world
according to his own moods. This individual element often appears in
the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic conceptions of
the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities. Two
writers of this period by investing nature with a spirit of melancholy
illustrate one of the many ways in which romantic thought seeks
individuality of expression.

In the fourth place, the romantic movement encouraged the portrayal of
broader experiences and especially the expression of deeper feeling.
The mid-eighteenth century novels of Richardson and