The forlornness at the loss of faith is curiously combined in many of the romanticists with the mood of revolt. This type of romanticist heaps reproaches on a God in whose existence he no longer believes (as in Leconte de Lisle’s “Quaïn,” itself related to Byron’s “Cain”). He shakes his fist at an empty heaven, or like Alfred de Vigny (in his _Jardin des Oliviers_) assumes towards this emptiness an attitude of proud disdain. He is loath to give up this grandiose defiance of divinity if only because it helps to save him from subsiding into platitude. A somewhat similar mood appears in the “Satanic” Catholics who continue to cling to religion simply because it adds to the gusto of sinning.[255] A Barbey succeeded in combining the rôle of Byronic Titan with that of champion of the Church. But in general the romantic Prometheus spurns the traditional forms of communion whether classical or Christian. He is so far as everything established is concerned enormously centrifugal, but he hopes to erect on the ruins of the past the new religion of human brotherhood. Everything in this movement from Shaftesbury down hinges on the rôle that is thus assigned to sympathy: if it can really unite men who are at the same time indulging each to the utmost his own “genius” or idiosyncrasy there is no reason why one should not accept romanticism as a philosophy of life. But nowhere else perhaps is the clash more violent between the theory and the fact. No movement is so profuse in professions of brotherhood and none is so filled with the aching sense of solitude. “Behold me then alone upon the earth,” is the sentence with which Rousseau begins his last book;[256] and he goes on to marvel that he, the “most loving of men,” had been forced more and more into solitude. “I am in the world as though in a strange planet upon which I have fallen from the one that I inhabited.”[257] When no longer subordinated to something higher than themselves both the head and the heart (in the romantic sense) not only tend to be opposed to one another, but also, each in its own way, to isolate. Empedocles was used not only by Arnold but by other victims[258] of romantic melancholy, as a symbol of intellectual isolation: by his indulgence in the “imperious lonely thinking power” Empedocles has broken the warm bonds of sympathy with his fellows: thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,-- But a naked eternally restless mind! His leaping into Ætna typifies his attempt to escape from his loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself.