The Project Gutenberg eBook, A History of English Romanticism in the
Nineteenth Century, by Henry A. Beers

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Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

Author: Henry A. Beers

Release Date: May 28, 2005 [eBook #15931]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by

HENRY A. BEERS

Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc.

New York
Henry Holt and Company

1918

ROMANCE

My love dwelt in a Northern land.
A grey tower in a forest green
Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen,
And leagues on leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.

And through the silver Northern light
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.

I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green,
My heart is colder than the clay.

ANDREW LANG.

PREFACE.

The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in
the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References
in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of
this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to
those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century
was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent
romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the
whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth
century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider
meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have
chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth
century is at le