ts of romance writing, the word romance is sometimes
taken as synonymous with falsehood. Thus the French talk of _Des
Romans_, and thus the English use the word Romancing.

But in this sense we had much better use the word falsehood at once. It
is far plainer and clearer. And if in this sense I put anything romantic
before you, pray pay no attention to it, or to me.

30. In the second place. Because young people are particularly apt to
indulge in reverie, and imaginative pleasures, and to neglect their
plain and practical duties, the word romantic has come to signify weak,
foolish, speculative, unpractical, unprincipled. In all these cases it
would be much better to say weak, foolish, unpractical, unprincipled.
The words are clearer. If in this sense, also, I put anything romantic
before you, pray pay no attention to me.

31. But in the third and last place. The real and proper use of the word
romantic is simply to characterize an improbable or unaccustomed degree
of beauty, sublimity, or virtue. For instance, in matters of history, is
not the Retreat of the Ten Thousand romantic? Is not the death of
Leonidas? of the Horatii? On the other hand, you find nothing romantic,
though much that is monstrous, in the excesses of Tiberius or Commodus.
So again, the battle of Agincourt is romantic, and of Bannockburn,
simply because there was an extraordinary display of human virtue in
both these battles. But there is no romance in the battles of the last
Italian campaign, in which mere feebleness and distrust were on one
side, mere physical force on the other. And even in fiction, the
opponents of virtue, in order to be romantic, must have sublimity
mingled with their vice. It is not the knave, not the ruffian, that are
romantic, but the giant and the dragon; and these, not because they are
false, but because they are majestic. So again as to beauty. You feel
that armor is romantic, because it is a beautiful dress, and you are not
used to it. You do not feel there is anything romantic in the paint and
shells of a Sandwich Islander, for these are not beautiful.

32. So, then, observe, this feeling which you are accustomed to
despise--this secret and poetical enthusiasm in all your hearts, which,
as practical men, you try to restrain--is indeed one of the holiest
parts of your being. It is the instinctive delight in, and admiration
for, sublimity, beauty, and virtue, unusually manifested. And so far
from being a dangerous guide,