Romanticism established, as its first principles, freedom of creation and nationality of poetry, and these principles survived romanticism itself. Now, while romanticism preached freedom of creation, it circumscribed this freedom by selecting as subjects for poetical compositions chiefly the extraordinary sides of life, its majestic moments. Its heroes were always choice, powerful natures, who suffered profoundly because of the lot of all mankind, and were capable of gigantic conflicts against the whole world. Classicism had bequeathed this habit of regarding as worthy of poetical treatment only heroes who stood out from the mass, and of depicting these heroes only at critical crises. All this depended, in a great degree, upon the political and social conditions which prevailed at that epoch--the beginning of the nineteenth century. But quieter, more peaceful times dawned, and with them men's tastes and habits of mind underwent a change. They grew tired of scorning and hating reality, because it did not conform to their cherished dreams, and they began coolly to study it. The titanic heroes, who had become tiresome and anti-pathetic to the last degree, made way for ordinary mortals in their everyday surroundings. Lyrical exaltation was superseded by calm observation, or disintegrating analysis of the different elements of life; pathetic misery made way for cold irony, or jeeringly melancholy humor; and at last poetry was succeeded by prose, and the ruling poetical forms of the new epoch became the romance and the novel. This change took place almost simultaneously in all the literatures of Europe.