Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements
of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence
of romanticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. It
ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the
electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds
man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could
thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings
of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect
clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never
try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily
intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley,
the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed,
however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of
finding expression for a very different order of ideas.

Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may
be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least
unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of
curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of
feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect
sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of
_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court
and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies,
ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not
broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and
nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was
centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of
civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice,
Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the