Romance, in its modern
development, is largely a question of background. A romantic love-affair
might be defined as a love-affair in other than domestic surroundings.
Who can use the word "romantic" with more authority than Coleridge? In
_Kubla Khan_, a poem which some would choose as the high-water mark of
English romantic poetry, he gets his effect from the description of a
landscape combining the extremes of beauty and terror:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
* * * * *
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
Romance demands scenery; and it should never be forgotten that the age of
Pope, the age of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was an age when the
taste for wild scenery in painting and in gardening was at its height. If
the house was set in order, the garden broke into a wilderness. Addison
in the _Spectator_ (No. 414) praises the new art of landscape gardening:
There is generally in nature something more grand and august, than
what we meet with in the curiosities of art.
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