of the
Bourbons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make and unmake romantics.
Often society catches up with the romanticist; he is no longer a
soldier of revolt; he has become a "respectable." Or, while remaining a
poet, he shifts his attention to some more familiar segment of the
idealistic circle. He sings about his wife instead of the wife of
somebody else. Like Wordsworth, he takes for his theme a Mary
Hutchinson instead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring figure of
Lucy. To put it differently, the high light, the mysterious color of
dawn or sunset disappears from his picture of human life. Or, the high
light may be diffused in a more tranquil radiance over the whole
surface of experience. Such an artist may remain a true painter or
poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter any longer. He has, like
the aging Emerson, taken in sail; the god Terminus has said to him, "no
more."

One must of course admit that the typical romanticist has often been
characterized by certain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the
great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for example, may not possess
these weaknesses at all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately in
love with the romantic in life and with romanticism in literature; but
it did not make him eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for
enduring romance was so admirably fine that it brought strength to the
sinews of his mind, light and air and fire to his soul. Among the
writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who has written some of the
keenest satire upon romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute his
real mistress, the true romance.

"Who wast, or yet the Lights were set,
A whisper in the void,
Who shalt be sung through planets young
When this is clean destroyed."

What are the causes of American romance, the circumstances and
qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and
character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters,
we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a
question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race
under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the
headiness and excitability of youth. It was young men who emigrated
hither, just as in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who filled the
Northern and the Southern armies. The first generations of American
immigration were made up chiefly of vigorous, imagina