The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance recedes in the middle of the scene.  This love of perspective is repeated in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault.  In our poetry, in our religion these twilight thoughts prevail.  We seek no completeness here.  What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us.  Hence the greater spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more passionate tenderness.  But hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought of death has had for the Gothic mind.  The classic nations concentrated their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness and the tomb.  Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful.  Their decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its deformities rather than to prolong its reminders.  The presence of the corpse was pollution.  No Greek could have conceived such a book as the “Hydriotaphia” or the “Anatomy of Melancholy.”

It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between the antique and the medieval.  He says:  “It must not be supposed that ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any classic page in the literature of modern Europe. . .  The literary line of demarcation is not identical with the chronological one.”  And just as Pater says that the Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that “the story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the ‘Golden Ass’ of Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.”  Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance:  Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood.

So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that “a predilection for classic subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word romantic.  The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of subject than of treatment. . .  In classical writing every idea is called up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent atmosphere.  Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines.  The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while