One idea has however lingered in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this romantic theorizing—namely that man has access to the infinite only through nature.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Wordsworth's paradoxes about children have a similar origin. A child who at the age of six is a "mighty prophet, seer blest" is a highly improbable not to say impossible child. The "Nature" again of "Heart-Leap Well" which both feels and inspires pity is more remote from normal experience than the Nature "red in tooth and claw" of Tennyson.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

While at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille's marriage to another. "In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die." Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady's maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets "two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum." While awaiting the departure of the diligence he "rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog." Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a "'Ha!' so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller." But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there "the twenty happiest days" of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there are a few in whom the voice of "nature" is still strong and who, to be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century an almost technical meaning, are the "beautiful souls." Those whose souls are beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of less exquisite sensibility.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Poe was fond of quoting a saying of Bacon's that "there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." This saying became known in France through Baudelaire's rendering of Poe and was often ascribed to Poe himself. It was taken to mean that the stranger one became the nearer one was getting to perfect beauty. And if we grant this view of beauty we must admit that some of the decadents succeeded in becoming very beautiful indeed. But the more the element of proportion in beauty is sacrificed to strangeness the more the result will seem to the normal man to be, not beauty at all, but rather an esoteric cult of ugliness. The romantic genius therefore denounces the normal man as a philistine and at the same time, since he cannot please him, seeks at least to shock him and so capture his attention by the very violence of eccentricity.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The nobility of Schiller's intentions is beyond question. At the same time, by encouraging the notion that it is possible to escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the aesthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality. In art, according to Schiller, both imagination and feeling should be free and spontaneous, and the result of all this freedom, as he sees it, will be perfectly "ideal." His suspicion of a purpose is invincible. As soon as anything has a purpose it ceases to be aesthetic and in the same measure suffers a loss of dignity. Thus the aesthetic moment of the lion, he says, is when he roars not with any definite design, but out of sheer lustiness, and for the pure pleasure of roaring.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The first thing that strikes one about the classicism of this period is that it does not rest on immediate perception like that of the Greeks but on outer authority. The merely dogmatic and traditional classicist gave a somewhat un-Greek meaning to the doctrines of nature and imitation. Why imitate nature directly, sad Scaliger, when we have in Virgil a second nature? Imitation thus came to mean the imitation of certain outer models and the following of rules based on these models.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

In case of doubt the neo-classicist is always ready to sacrifice fancy to the "substantial, useful part," and so he seems too negative and cool and prosaic in his reason, and this is because his reason is so largely a protest against a previous romantic excess. What had been considered genius in the time of the "metaphysicals" had too often turned out to be only oddity. With this warning before them men kept their eyes fixed very closely on the model of normal human nature that had been set up, and imitated it very literally and timorously. A man was haunted by the fear that he might be "monstrous," and so, as Rymer put it, "satisfy nobody's maggot but his own." Correctness thus became a sort of tyranny. We suffer to the present day from this neo-classical failure to work out a sound conception of the imagination in its relation to good sense. Because the neo-classicist held the imagination lightly as compared with good sense the romantic rebels were led to hold good sense lightly as compared with imagination. The romantic view in short is too much the neo-classical view turned upside down; and, as Sainte-Beuve says, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

He avoided the amorous element, as if he was ashamed of it, he frequently described nature, and in his descriptions liked to use such expressions as "the whimsical contours of the mountains," "the fantastic shapes of the clouds," or "the accord of mysterious harmonies".

—Anton Chekhov, Three Years

People, if they could afford it, made their gardens look “wild” and “ancient” by putting in bits of Gothic apparatus. Some proud owners of Gothic grottoes even hired poor old men to sit in them as hermits to impress visitors.
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

But it cannot be denied also that, for some—and for an increasing number as the decades went by—the new kind of transcendent music Beethoven wrote, and the new importance he gave to music in the intellectual and moral cosmos, did constitute a secular substitute for religion: There was a new faith, and Beethoven was its prophet. It was no accident that, about this time, new concert halls were being given temple-type facades, thus exalting the moral and cultural status of the symphony and chamber music.
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

The artist should not only paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If, however, he sees nothing inside himself, then he should also stop painting what he sees in front of him. Otherwise his pictures will look like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or even the dead.

---Caspar David Friedrich, quoted in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe

The development of a new expressive aesthetic, which placed the artist at the centre of the creative process, greatly enhanced his self-esteem and - eventually - his status. It also opened the way for him to become the high priest of the sacralized culture which increasingly became a supplement to, or even a substitute for, organized religion, as the construction of museums, theatres, opera-houses, and concert-halls in the style of classical temples demonstrated.

---T. C. W. Blanning, "Introduction", in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe

From being the agent who strives to give the natural laws of beauty visible, aural, or verbal form, the artist raises himself to become the prime point of reference. In other words, mimesis (art in relation to nature) was replaced by an expressive aesthetic (art in relation to the artist).

---T. C. W. Blanning, "The Commercialization and Sacralization of European Culture in the Nineteenth Century", in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe