Romanticism is at bottom a sigh for the things that perish, and the things that can never happen again. It is like the soldier going over the hill to fight, but always looking back and lingering. The things that Time destroys we love with a love fed by romantic regret--the sunset that will never just happen again, the snows of yester-year, the beliefs that are being sapped, the days of our own childhood. In _The Cloister and the Hearth_, Gerard at the beginning of his wanderings is kindly treated by a woman and her husband; as he leaves them they wish him “God speed,” and, says the author, “with that they parted, and never met again in this world”; and nobody can read that sentence without loving these people more. If some novelists had described this incident, if, say Dickens had been writing this, it would have been part of his way of working, it would have been in keeping with his avowed theories of life, to renew the connection between Gerard and his kind acquaintances later in life, and by some coincidence to make the good woman and her husband turn up when we had forgotten their existence. But Reade not only declines to do this, he goes out of his way, beforehand, to tell us that he is not going to do this; he makes these people pass out into the darkness and so he leaves us with a feeling of affectionate regret for them. When we know a thing must die, something comes to reinforce our love for it, and if we were all told to take our last look upon this earth to-morrow, what worst of world-haters would not ask again and again for “just one peep more”? Universal literature is full of regrets for all the lovely things that die. All history is full of movements that are born of romantic reactions--of prophets stoned on one day and mourned the next, of rejected leaders idolised when they have passed off the stage and soon carried to power again by a mad romantic impulse that moves the people, of kings beheaded and then loved when they have become a memory, of Restorations, of returns from Elba, and of Jacobite risings. Every generation cries that the world is going to the dogs and that things are not as they have been, and two years before the Spanish Armada was routed an Englishman could complain that English courage was on the wane. All this is romanticism; and it is romanticism that makes old men gather round a chimney-corner to tell a tale of old times, and makes hardened heroes love to fight their battles over again. It is this feeling that sends us treading again the haunts of childhood and recapturing childhood scenes; that makes our imagination play around historic sites and ancient buildings, peopling them with a life that we have invented, and awaking them to their former activeness; and that so thrills the heart with a sense of the great bygone things, that some men cannot see the sun go down red without dreaming of battles long ago, till the moors become alive with excited horsemen and with noises