d;
Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, his seeker
for the fountains of living knowledge; Schiller's revolters against
social law, and his adventurers of the court and camp.

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came a renewal of
language and of metre. The poetical diction of the eighteenth century
had grown colourless and abstract; general terms had been preferred
to particular; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced by
periphrases--the cock was "the domestic bird that announces the day."
The romantic poets sought for words--whether noble or vulgar--that
were coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with
Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam,
their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the language
were recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. By
degrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity;
sentences and periods grew rather than were built; phrases were alive,
and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. Verse was moulded
by the feeling that inspired it; the melodies were like those of an
Eolian harp, long-drawn or retracted as the wind swept or touched
the strings. Symmetry was slighted; harmony was valued for its own
sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes satisfied or
surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes suffered through his
curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal licences--the mobile cesura,
new variations and combinations--the power of the alexandrine was
marvellously enlarged; it lost its monotony and became capable of
every achievement; its external restraints were lightened; verse
glided into verse as wave overtaking wave. The accomplishment of these
changes was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were
the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, Hugo
contributed to the later evolution of romantic verse. The influence
on poetical form of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance.

The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's _Poemes_,
the _Odes_ of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, though
the direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to the
same moment belongs the indictment of classical literature by Henri
Beyle ("Stendhal") in his study entitled _Racine et Shakespeare_.
Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the Arsenal, gathered the
young revolters--among them Vigny, Sainte-