The unfinished novel Henry of Ofterdingen reaches a depth of obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals:  “The blue flower it is that I yearn to look upon!” No farcical romance of the nursery shows more truly the mingled stuff that dreams are made on, yet the intimation that the dream is not all a dream, that the spirit of an older day is symbolically struggling for some expression in words, gave it in its day a serious importance at which our own age can merely marvel.  It brings no historical conviction; it is altogether free from such conventional limits as Time and Space.  Stripped of its dreamy diction, there is even a tropical residue of sensuousness, to which the English language is prone to give a plainer name.  It develops into a fantastic melange which no American mind can possibly reckon with; what its effect would be upon a person relegated to reading it in close confinement, it would not be safe to assert, but it is quite certain that “this way madness lies.”

To generalize about the Romantic movement, may seem about as practical as to attempt to make a trigonometrical survey of the Kingdom of Dreams.  No epoch in all literary history is so hopelessly entangled in the meshes of subtle philosophical speculation, derived from the most complex sources.  To deal with the facts of classic art, which is concerned with seeking a clearly-defined perfection, is a simple matter compared with the unbounded and undefined concepts of a school which waged war upon “the deadliness of ascertained facts” and immersed itself in vague intimations of glories that were to be.  Its most authorized exponent declared it to be “the delineation of sentimental matter in fantastic form.”  A more elaborated authoritative definition is given in the first volume of the Athenaeum: 

“Romantic poetry is a progressive universal-poetry.  Its aim is not merely to reunite all the dispersed classes of poetry, and to place poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric; it aims and ought to aim to mingle and combine poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic and natural poetry; to make poetry lively and social, to make life and society poetic; to poetize wit, to saturate all the forms of art with worthy materials of culture and enliven them by the sallies of humor.  It embraces everything that is poetic, from the greatest and most inclusive system of art, to the sigh, the kiss, that the poetic child utters in artless song.  Other classes of poetry are complete, and may now be exhaustively dissected; romantic poetry is still in process of becoming—­in fact this is its chief characteristic, that it forever can merely become, but never be completed.  It can never be exhausted by any theory, and only an intuitive criticism could dare to attempt to characterize its ideals.  It alone is endless, as it alone is free, and asserts as its first law that the whim of the poet tolerates no law above itself.  Romantic poetry is the only sort which is more than a class, and, as it were, the art of poetry itself.”