Crossword-Solution: ROMANTICS 9 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing _Jehan_ for _Jean_, swaggering in Gautier’s red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public café with paradox and gasconnade.

The idea that they are is due to our “realistic” journalists and critics of that day, always on the look out for Kostanzhoglos and Uncle Pyotr Ivanitchs and foolishly accepting them as our ideal; they have slandered our romantics, taking them for the same transcendental sort as in Germany or France.

But what am I saying! The romantic is always intelligent, and I only meant to observe that although we have had foolish romantics they don’t count, and they were only so because in the flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to preserve their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there—by preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.

The Romantics are individualist, anarchic; the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to a voice.

The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as “a dead Romantic.” In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death.