breath, 'the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism.' [Footnote: Essay
on the Study of Literature, Section 56.] No wonder if in his days, and
for a long time after, the passionate giants of the Ages of Fable had
dwindled down to the pretty puppets with which the daughters of the
gentry had to while away many a school hour.

But the days of this rhetorical--or satirical, didactic--or
perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the
glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the
foam of perilous seas' in the West, but also on

the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the Sun, that now
From ancient melody had ceased.
[Footnote: Blake, _Poetical Sketches_, 1783.]

Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general
rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of
delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of
mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought
assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its
antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs
of a more impassioned worship.

The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in
England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to
classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier--the last,
indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries--had long
rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its
enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show