d for that very reason attracted so irresistibly.
Although the hearers were awake, they were entertained _as though in a
dream_."

Hence a purely lyric attitude toward life, which was apprehended only
on transcendent, musical valuations. Poetry was to be the heart and
centre of actual living; modern life seemed full of "prose and
pettiness" as compared with the Middle Ages; it was the doctrine of
this Mary in the family of Bethany to leave to the Martha of dull
externalists the care of many things, while she "chose the better
part" in contemplative lingering at the vision of what was essentially
higher. A palpitant imagination outranks "cold intelligence;"
sensation, divorced from all its bearings or functions, is its own
excuse for being. Of responsibility, hardly a misty trace; realities
are playthings and to be treated allegorically.

The step was not a long one to the thesis that "disorder and confusion
are the pledge of true efficiency"--such being one of the
"seed-thoughts" of Novalis. In mixing all species, Romanticism amounts
to unchartered freedom, "_die gesunde, kraeftige Ungezogenheit_." It is
no wonder that so many of its literary works remain unfinished
fragments, and that many of its exponents led unregulated lives.

"Get you irony, and form yourself to urbanity" is the counsel of
Friedrich Schlegel. The unbridgeable chasm between Ideal and Life
could not be spanned, and the baffled idealist met this hopelessness
with the shrug of irony. The every-day enthusiasm of the common life
invited only a sneer, often, it is true, associated with flashing wit.

Among its more pleasing manifestations, Romanticism shows a remarkable
group of gifted, capable women, possibly because this philosophy of
intuition corresponds to the higher intimations of woman's soul. Other
obvious fruits of the movement were the revival of the poetry and
dignity of the Middle Ages, both in art and life--that colorful,
form-loving musical era which the Age of Enlightenment had so crassly
despised. That this yearning for the beautiful background led to
reaction in politics and religion is natural enough; more edifying are
the rich fruits which scholarship recovered when Romanticism had
directed it into the domains of German antiquity and philology, and
the wealth of popular song. In addition to these, we must reckon the
spoils which these adventurers brought back from their quest into the
faery lands of Poetry in southern climes.

Whe