_romantisme_ is perhaps worth
noticing.

[38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20.

[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829.

[40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23.

CHAPTER VI.

Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century.

Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic
in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress,
sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in
distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious,
subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of
the _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the like
marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the
nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same
is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the
century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with
Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are
romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete,
pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with
Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan
dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian
amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical
successors.

But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in these
inquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death
of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both
had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative
literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before
Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism of
Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it
condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the
century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the
Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the
romantic school proper in Germany bears to Buerger and Herder, and to
Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their
mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final.

We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the
material