abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what
was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance,
indeed, is now generally used to denote not [2] merely the revival
of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century,
and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but
one element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of
a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the
desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make
themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search
out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative
enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old
and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of
fresh sources thereof--new experiences, new subjects of poetry,
new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in
the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century.
Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed
architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of
Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness;
and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of
the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the
springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming
after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that
true "dark age," in which so many sources of intellectual and
imaginative enjoyment had [3] actually disappeared, this
outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of
thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry,