And herds of strange deer, lily-white,
Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.

I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green,
My heart is colder than the clay.

ANDREW LANG.





PREFACE.

The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in
the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References
in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of
this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to
those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century
was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent
romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the
whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth
century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider
meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have