It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by considering a few other definitions of romantic which have been proposed.  Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly[9] for March, 1886, inquired, “What do we mean by romantic?” Goethe, he says, characterized the difference between classic and romantic “as equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid.  Schiller proposed ’naive and sentimental.’[10] The greater part [of the German critics] regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, which was partly true, but explained nothing.  None of the definitions given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11]

Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the sense of mystery.  “The essence of romance,” he writes, “is mystery”; and he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery.  “The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows not whither, are romantic:  the public highway is not.”  “The winding secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river.”  “Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight.”  Dr. Hedge attributes this fondness for the mysterious to “the influence of the Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense.”

This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that “strangeness added to beauty” which Pater takes to be the distinguishing feature of romantic art.  Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts that “the essence of romanticism is aspiration.”  Much might be said in defense of this position.  It has often been pointed out, e.g., that a Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied completeness.  Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the classic is equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can hardly be covered by any single phrase.  Dr. Hedge himself enumerates several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration.  Thus he announces that “the peculiarity of the classic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer”; while “the romantic is self-reflecting.”  “Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the prominent feature of the classic style.  The modern writer gives you not so much the things themselves as his impression of them.”  Here then is the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective methods—­Schiller’s naiv and sentimentalisch—­applied as a criterion of classic and romantic style.  This contrast the essayist develops at some length, dwelling upon “the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the classic style, where the medium is lost in the object”; and “on the other hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring of the romantic style.”