In this period and the far more glorious one that followed, romanticism made its influence felt for the better in four different ways.  An understanding of each of these will make us more intelligent critics.

In the first place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the prosaic.  The romantic yearns for the light that never was on sea or land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible.  Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not its meaning in literature.  The romantic may not always be “of imagination all compact,” but it has a tendency in that direction.  To the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the classicists, the romanticists can enjoy The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen.  Any movements that stimulate imaginative activity must give the individual more points of contact with the part of the world that does not obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts of existence that cold intellectual activity can never comprehend.  Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view.

In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed.  Hence, too much repetition may take away a necessary quality from what was once considered romantic.  The epithets “ivory” and “raven,” when applied to “brow” and to “tresses,” respectively, were at first romantic; but much repetition has deprived them of this quality.  If an age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point of view somewhat different from that of the age immediately preceding.  This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the manner of its presentation, or in both.  An example of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of the French school.  In the next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.

In the third place, the highest type of romanticism encourages each author to express himself in an individual way, to color the world according to his own moods.  This individual element often appears in the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic conceptions of the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities.  Two writers of this period by investing nature with a spirit of melancholy illustrate one of the many ways in which romantic thought seeks individuality of expression.

In the fourth place, the romantic movement encouraged the portrayal of broader experiences and especially the expression of deeper feeling.  The mid-eighteenth century novels of Richardson and Fielding were strong agencies in this direction; and they were followed in the next age by the even more intense appeal of the great romantic poets to those thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears.