E-text prepared by Al Haines
by
Author of A Suburban Pastoral, The Ways of Yale, etc.
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1918
My love dwelt in a Northern land.
A grey tower in a forest green
Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen,
And leagues on leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.
And through the silver Northern light
The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.
I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green,
My heart is colder than the clay.
The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism inthe Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). Referencesin the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties ofthis second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite tothose of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth centurywas an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latentromanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon thewhole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenthcentury has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the widermeaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I havechosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenthcentury is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, bothin bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection;and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton andHurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of alleducated readers.
As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of mydefinition of romanticism. But every writer has a right to make hisown definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. Ihave not written a history of the "liberal movement in Englishliterature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipationof the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of theMediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the useof romantic in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, Iprefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of theChristian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of thosemore pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardnessof romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting oneof these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.
M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It isthe "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo,and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny thatWalter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it islyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition ofromantic which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself isrespectful to