rches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or
pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches
of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being,
moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the
decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders.
The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in
the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the
winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek
fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their
elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure
of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in
festoons over the arches."

All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism
and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and
still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying
Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by
no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of
Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the
reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his
genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have
equalled the "Iliad."

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all
hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _litterature romantique_ were
first invented or imported by Madame de Stael in her "L'Allemagne"
(1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes
litteraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal
published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had
been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian
journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his
temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic
definition of romanticism.[35]

In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a
literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck,
although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of
all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the
newspapers of all shades of political opini