the other hand, the Northern man is initiated into the beauties of Italian architecture, his romantic feeling is apt to wane, as he himself admits:
" 'Tis not for centuries four for nought
Our European world of thought
Hath made familiar to its home
The classic mind of Greece and Rome;
In all new work that would look forth
To more than antiquarian worth,
Palladio's pediments and bases,
Or something such, will find their places:
Maturer optics don't delight
In childish dim religious light,
In evanescent vague effects
That shirk, notface, one's intellects;
They love not fancies just betrayed,
And artful tricks of light and shade,
But pure form nakedly displayed,
And all things absolutely made."
The feeling thus expressed by Clough, speaking through the mouth of the Devil, is utterly contrary to the mystic awe and vague apprehension of infinity characteristic of romantic art. It is no wonder, therefore, that the movement engendered towards the middle of the eighteenth century by impatience with the prosaic present and reaction towards the neglected Middle Age, favoured by the moral atmosphere created by Rousseau, and for England and Germany so imperious a necessity that Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Novalis and Tieck, all romanticists from the cradle, appeared in the world within three years, should have been little heard of in Italy until Scott and Goethe had captivated the youthful genius of Manzoni. Yet a streak of romantic light had preceded, though from quite a different quarter, namely,
