And here we may notice a singular exchange of parts. When the word "Romantic" was first heard in Germany it had originally much the same sense as "Roman." The German Romanticists were moved to enthusiasm by Roman Catholicism and Roman church painting. But when Romanticism reached France, the word came to mean exactly the opposite: a preference for the German and English spirit as compared with the Greek and Latin, and an enthusiasm for the great Anglo-Saxon and German poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, in whom, contrasting with Racine's correctness, were to be found unrestrained genius and glowing passion. This influence of poetry over art may easily become dangerous, if painters sponge, so to speak, upon the poet, as the Düsseldorf school did, and make use of his work only for the purpose of enabling works, in themselves valueless, to keep their heads, artistically speaking, above water, by means of their extrinsic poetical interest. But Delacroix had no need of any such support. He was not the poets' pupil, but their brother. He did not study them in order to illustrate their works, but was imbued with their spirit and possessed by their souls. He lived with them; he did not borrow his subjects from them, but rather made use of them to express in his own powerful language the strongest emotions of the human heart. Nor did he ever forget that painting must, before all, be painting. Endowed as he was with a poet's soul, he conceived things as a painter, not laboriously translating passages from the poets, but simply thinking in colour. What the musician hears, what the poet imagines, he saw. The scenes of which he read appeared at once before his eyes as sketches, in great masses of colour. For him, composition, action, and colour ever united together into one inseparable whole. [Illustration: DELACROIX. ENTRY OF THE CRUSADERS INTO CONSTANTINOPLE.]