The Gothic Revival, and the newly-awakened interest in medievalism, warmed the imaginations of verse men and prose men alike.  The impulse to wander, to scale some “peak in Darien” for the joy of a “wild surmise,” seized every artist in letters—poet, novelist, essayist.  A longing for the mystic world, a passion for the unknown, surged over men’s minds with the same power and impetuosity as it had done in the days of the Renaissance.  Ordinary life had grown uglier, more sordid; life seemed crushed in the thraldom of mechanism.  Men felt like schoolboys pent up in a narrow whitewashed room who look out of the windows at the smiling and alluring world beyond the gates.  Small wonder that some who hastened to escape should enter more p. 13thoroughly than more cautious souls into the unconventional and the changeful.

The swing of the pendulum. . . Read More