The Romantic Temperament:
Sensitive, emotional, preferring colors to form, the exotic
to the familiar, eager for novelty, for adventure; above all for the vicarious
adventure of fantasy. Reveling in disorder and fantasy, insistent on the
uniqueness of the individual to the point of making a virtue of eccentricity.
The typical romantic will hold that he cannot be typical for the very concept
of the typical suggests the work of the pigeonholing intellect he scorns.
Though his contempt for this world of reason and common sense calculation may
push him toward otherworldliness, the romantic is too much of a man of words
and sensations to make a good mystic. He may admire the mystic, especially the
exotic mystic of the East, but he himself is a good Westerner.
–Crane Brinton (1898-1968)
