Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 151 



There, gentlemen, cried the poet, there is a description for 

 you. 



"A cap by night — a stocking all the day." 



There is sound and sense and truth and nature in the trifling com- 

 pass of ten syllables. 



I said a moment ago that the couplets of Hayly are very bad. 

 Take a specimen : — 



Her airy guard prepares the softest down 

 From Peace's wing to line the nuptial crown. 



Here you have the image of a guardian angel holding Peace as 

 firmly as an Irish housewife holds a goose, and plucking her 

 steadily in order to line the nuptial crown with feathers. The 

 nuptial crown was perhaps a kind of picture hat — or a sunbonnet. 

 The Romantic writer is at no pains to make a pause at the 

 end of a line, or even the end of a couplet. He constantly 

 makes use of the overflow (enjambment) from one line and one 

 couplet to another, and he " counts accents rather than 

 syllables." But not in metre only, but in diction, imagery, 

 letter-music, suggestion, and these in forms that are novel and 

 original does Romantic poetry differ from Classic. Simplicity 

 and correctness of language, precision, order, restraint, modera- 

 tion : these are the qualities aimed at by the Classic poet. 

 " What is there lovely in poetry, ' ' says Landor, " unless there be 

 moderation and composure?" The essence of Romance is 

 mystery ; it is the sense of something hidden, of imperfect revela- 

 tion. It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, says Mr Pater, 

 that constitutes the romantic character in art : it is the addition 

 of curiosity to the desire for beauty that constitutes the Romantic 

 temper. The aim of the Classic poet is to instruct, to edify, to 

 elevate ; the aim of the romantic poet is to affect, to again affect 

 and yet again affect. Romance in poetry was a strange way of 

 escape from the oppression of the common-place, a strange mode 

 of deliverance from the monotony of routine. Romance carries 

 the emotions beyond the world of sense and creates for us a 

 new Heaven and a new Earth of poetry. Romance, according 

 to Wordsworth and Coleridge, makes the natural appear super- 

 natural. Suppose we. invert the proposition and say, "Romance 



