erman, after all, is
only a fisherman at bottom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but
he wants to catch different species of fish from those which drop into
the basket of the landsman. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does
not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an old Alsatian soldier who
was patiently holding his rod over a most unpromising canal near
Strassburg, what kind of fish he was fishing for. "All kinds," was his
rebuking answer, and I took off my hat to the veteran romanticist.

The words "romance" and "romanticism" have been repeated to the ears of
our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck
of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew
that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day
may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth
and Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth and Coleridge and not
documents illustrating the history of the romantic movement. But the
rising generation is sophisticated. For better or worse it has been
taught to distinguish between the word "romance" on the one side, and
the word "romanticism" on the other. "Romantic" is a useful but
overworked adjective which attaches itself indiscriminately to both
"romance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, for example, and a
hundred other writers, have pointed out that in the narrower and more
usual sense, the words "romance" and "romanticism" point to a love of
vivid coloring and strongly marked contrasts; to a craving for the
unfamiliar, the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the wider and
less definite sense, they signify a revolt from the purely intellectual
view of man's nature; a recognition of the instincts and the passions,
a vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around
him,--in one word, the sense of mystery. The narrower and the broader
meanings pass into one another by imperceptible shades. They are
affected by the well-known historic conditions for romantic feeling in
the different European countries. The common factor, of course, is the
man with the romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier with his
love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured with the sound of words, Heine
with his self-destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his blue flower,
and Maeterlinck with his _Blue Bird_.

But these romantic men of letters, writing in epochs of romanticism,
are by no means the only children of romance. Sir Hum