the strange, the inexplicable, a sense of the unattainable
beyond our philosophical, as beyond our artistic reach,
is a striking component in the make-up of our early nine-
teenth-century romantic poetry. ¹ But this is not all; the
greatest poets do not leave us in puzzled and dissatisfied
perplexity, nor can the art that aims at it knows not
what, reached it knows not how, charm much beyond
the period of its novelty. Dubiety, approximation, and
incompleteness are no more qualities to be sought in art
than in science; the suggestiveness, the sense of something
seen from a new angle, the depth, beyond, so to speak,
which is of the very essence of romantic art, may be com-
passed in many other ways than by stirring the sense
of the marvellous. When all has been said, perhaps the
artists' word "atmosphere," long ago used by Coleridge,
most nearly expresses this quality of depth, the real crite-
rion of romantic art; certainly no poem, piece of fiction,
or picture that is without the something that we designate
"atmosphere," can be considered romantic. And we have
come to set such store on this matter of shadow and light
that we are wont, some of us hastily, to deny poetry, art,
grace, existence, to anything else.

The influences that make for a change in taste seldom
come singly or as the result of some one revolutionary
figure. If the nineties of the eighteenth century marked

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