ott, is nearly so representative of the romantic temper as
France, with Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo. It is in French
literature that its most characteristic expression is to be found; and
that, as most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar
conditions, as ever reinforce it to the utmost.

For, although temperament has much to do with the generation of the
romantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity,
its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellent
art (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it may
be said to be a product of special epochs. Outbreaks of this spirit,
that is, come naturally with particular periods--times, when, in men's
approaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed to take the
lead, when men come to art and poetry, with a deep thirst for
intellectual excitement, after a long ennui, or in reaction against the
strain of outward, practical things: in the later Middle Age, for
instance; so that medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed
to Greek and Roman poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical. What
the romanticism of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the lines
in which Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flows
the blood of Polydorus, not without the expression of a real shudder at
the ghastly incident, with the whole canto of the Inferno, into which
Dante has expanded them, beautifying and softening it, meanwhile, by a
sentiment of profound pity. And it is especially in that period of
intellectual disturbance, immediately preceding Dante, amid which the
romance languages define themselves at last, that this temper is
manifested. Here, in the literature of Provence, the very name of
romanticism is stamped with its true signification: here we have indeed
a romantic world, grotesque [251] even, in the strength of its
passions, almost insane in its curious expression of them, drawing all
things into its sphere, making the birds, nay! lifeless things, its
voices and messengers, yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty and
sweetness, that it begets a wholly new species of poetry, in which the
Renaissance may be said to begin. The last century was pre-eminently a
classical age, an age in which, for art and literature, the element of
a comely order was in the ascendant; which, passing away, left a hard
battle to be fought between the classical and the romantic s