Thought for the day ...

Romanticism may not inaccurately be described as a conviction that the world is an Englischer Garten on a grand scale. The God of the seventeenth century, like its gardeners, always geometrized; the God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The preference for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectualized . . . which were eventually to invade the intellectual life of Europe at all points, made their first modern appearance on a grand scale in the eighteenth century in the form of the new fashion in pleasure gardens.

- Arthur O. Lovejoy, born on this date in 1873