to be drawn somewhere; and,
whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it
does.

A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop
short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century
literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us,
beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to
stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand,
Madame de Stael, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo,
and perhaps others, in a future volume.

Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and
"romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced
upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us
defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and
fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each
term, that, in late literary language, they are set off, one over
against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily
antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for
what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is
a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established
order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established
order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance
in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the
acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to
cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to
shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate
grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full
measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,--not to
break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production,
but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for
things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as
in the active, sense of that word,--should accept form, as well as give
form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not
when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it
shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk
a concrete illustration--among our American poets, Bryant, in the
perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual d