t authorized exponent declared it to be "the delineation of
sentimental matter in fantastic form." A more elaborated authoritative
definition is given in the first volume of the _Athenaeum_:

"Romantic poetry is a progressive universal-poetry. Its aim is not
merely to reunite all the dispersed classes of poetry, and to place
poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric; it aims and ought to aim
to mingle and combine poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic
and natural poetry; to make poetry lively and social, to make life and
society poetic; to poetize wit, to saturate all the forms of art with
worthy materials of culture and enliven them by the sallies of humor.
It embraces everything that is poetic, from the greatest and most
inclusive system of art, to the sigh, the kiss, that the poetic child
utters in artless song. Other classes of poetry are complete, and may
now be exhaustively dissected; romantic poetry is still in process of
becoming--in fact this is its chief characteristic, that it forever
can merely become, but never be completed. It can never be exhausted
by any theory, and only an intuitive criticism could dare to attempt
to characterize its ideals. It alone is endless, as it alone is free,
and asserts as its first law that the whim of the poet tolerates no
law above itself. Romantic poetry is the only sort which is more than
a class, and, as it were, the art of poetry itself."

We may in part account for Romanticism by recalling that it was the
product of an age which was no longer in sympathy with its own tasks,
an age of political miseries and restrained powers, which turned away
from its own surroundings and sought to be free from all contact with
them, striving to benumb its sensations by an auto-intoxication of
dreams.

Romanticism is built upon the imposing corner-stone of the unique
importance of the Individual: "To become God, to be man, to develop
one's own being, these are expressions for the same thing." As
personality is supreme, it is natural that there should follow a
contempt for the mediocrity of current majorities, standards and
opinions. It abhorred universal abstractions, as opposed to the truth
and meaning of individual phenomena. It stoutly believed in an
inexpugnable right to Illusions, and held clarity and earnestness to
be foes of human happiness. "The poem gained great applause, because
it had so strange, so well-nigh unintelligible a sound. It was like
music itself, an