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: