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" unchartered freedom." In like manner by a process of ideal selection even the natural world is conceived as the seat of marvelous forces which rarely come to manifestation. (6) The free unfolding of each personality according to its genius involved recognition and obedience of all individual impulses, inclinations, and even idiosyncrasies. Various were the outward conditions in which the great romanticists developed their genius-Wordsworth in solitude, Scott in historical study of medieval life, Byron in wanderings and heroic devotion to the cause of liberty, Schelling and Schlegel in speculative philosophy, most of the French and German writers in more or less indifference to social conventions. The theory constantly reiterated is, that the genius must be free to follow his star so as to give his artistic powers free play. Not only must no constraint be permitted, but only in the pathway of perfect liberty can the individual reach the goal of self-realization. Instead of turning back to Greece and Rome or to the Middle Ages for their material, they isolate single aspects of their own experience and develop these as if they were in truth of universal validity. Whatever is vital in their writings is autobiographic. Each one felt that he must himself first live the romantic life, since only then was he able by subtle analysis and unsparing self-revelation of his inmost consciousness to portray his ideal. Accordingly he renounced conventions in his writings as he had already done in his life, he wrote as he felt and as he thought, and dipped his metal white hot from the seething cauldron of his own heart. (7) The romantic writings are all with scarcely an exception tinged with pantheism and mysticism. Philosophy, ethics, religion, no less than conceptions of nature and human love, so far as these are self-conscious, are frankly pantheistic. The infinite is not fully realized save as every possible form of consciousness and action and human relation finds expression. If the English pantheism was on the whole more sober and naturalistic than that of the German and French, this may be referred to the quieter temperament and severer restraint of the English mind. As related to mysticism, not all mystics are romanticists, and not all romanticists are mystics, but the two are commonly associated in the same person. The romanticists believe that reality is revealed not by rational thought, but through feeling, immediate experience, spiritual illumination. Accordingly a part of the meaning of life eludes analysis. Any portrayal of it, however concrete and vivid, is at best partial and suggestive rather than complete and final. On the other hand, in romantic experience ecstasy is never far away. The secret of gaining truth is less by searching than by brooding, by listening to the inner voices, by interpreting what is " given " in moments of rare and exalted feeling (see WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM).

Authorities are not agreed as to the exact beginnings of romanticism. One may, however, hold that, in literature, the earlier traces of the movement in Great Britain after Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are in the eighteenth century found in Thomas Gray, d. 1771, and William Blake, d. 1827 (cf. Arthur Symonds, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, New York, 1909); in France

in J. J. Rousseau, d. 1778; and in Germany in Herder (q.v.). In philosophy, its ultimate vindication is to be referred to Kant's (q.v.) Beginnings. primacy of the will, reaching its metaphysical exposition in the doctrine of Schopenhauer (q.v.) that the essence of man and world is will. In theology, one goes to Fichte and Schleiermacher (qq.v.) for the subjective and esthetic elements respectively.

The spirit of Romanticism has been active in other fields than those described above: in music, F. P. Schubert (d. 1828), F. F. Chopin (d. 1849), and R. Schumann (d. 1856); in paintSpirit. ing, J. M. W. Turner (d. 1851), and F. V. E. Delacroix (d. 1863); in travel, the inspiring motive of which since the latter part of the eighteenth century has been to quicken the feeling of beauty and sublimity in the presence of impressive natural scenery; in social experiment, as the Brook Farm episode, 1841-17, which sought to put into practise the system of association or phalanstery proposed by F. M. C. Fourier (d. 1837); and, finally, in appeal to the chivalrous and heroic in ministry to the suffering on the field of battle (Florence Nightingale, q.v., in the Crimea, 18541856) and in great cities (William Booth, q.v.).

nary brilliancy-tales, poems, dramas, essays, psychology, ethics, religion, and theology.