phrey Gilbert and
Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly followers of "the gleam" as were
Spenser or Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wherever and
whenever men say to themselves, as Don Quixote's niece said of her
uncle, that "they wish better bread than is made of wheat," or when
they look within their own hearts, and assert, as the poet Young said
in 1759, long before the English romantic movement had begun, "there is
more in the spirit of man than mere prose-reason can fathom."

We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully familiar, with the fact that
romance is likely to run a certain course in the individual and then to
disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, it resembles the upward and
downward zigzag of a fever chart. It has in fact often been described
as a measles, a disease of which no one can be particularly proud,
although he may have no reason to blush for it. Southey said that he
was no more ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a
boy. Well, people catch Byronism, and get over it, much as Southey got
over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough--though
he died at thirty-six--to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to
smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a
romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good
fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not
outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world.
Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning has preserved his
romance to the end. Tennyson dies at eighty-three with the full
moonlight streaming through the oriel window upon his bed, and with his
fingers clasping Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.

With most of us commonplace persons, however, a reaction from the
romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long
keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times
near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane
sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem
Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world"
presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The
simplest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders and let the weight
go. That is to say, we cease being poets, we are no longer the children
of romance, although we may remain idealists. Perhaps it is external
events that change, rather than we ourselves. The restoration