Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror, and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.
By John Keats
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: