1842

We're moving from the Romantic Period of Goethe, Hawthorne, Poe, Byron, Shelly and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge and others to The Victorian Period writers:  The Brontë sisters, (Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Philip Meadows Taylor, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George MacDonald, G.M. Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.

The dates of these two periods vary as much as the historian's points of view.  I just can’t get a straight answer.  And I believe these names overlap a bit -- so my opinion is this:  There is a gray line where the Romantic style of writing flows into a new fad, the Victorian style of writing.  As the time moves on in the Victorian Period the stories get more realistic.  Just for a time frame, let's say that the Romantic was from 1789 to 1837 and the Victorian in various stages moved from 1837 to 1901. 

This following poem was printed in the Steuben County Advocate which I find quite realistic. The author, Nathaniel Parker Willis, was the highest paid magazine writer of his day, with contemporaries like Longfellow and Poe. In 1842 he sounds tired at only 36 years of age:
Saturday Afternoon by N. P. Willis:

I love to look on a scene like this,
Of wild and careless play,
And persuade myself that I am not old,
And my locks are not yet grey,
For it stirs the blood in an old man's heart
And makes his pulses fly,
To catch the thrill of a happy voice,
And the light of a pleasant eye.
I have walked the world for fourscore years;
And they say that I am old,
And my heart is ripe for reaper, Death,
And my years are well nigh told.
It is very true -- it is very true --
I'm old and I bide my time,
But my heart will leap at a scene like this,
And I half review my prime.
Play on! Play on!  I am with you there,
In the midst of your merry ring;
I can feel the thrill of a daring jump,
And the rush of the breathless swing,
I hide with you in the fragrant hay,
And I whoop the smothered call,
And my feet slip up on the reedy floor,
And I care not for the fall.
I am willing to die when my time shall come,
And I shall be glad to go,
For the world at best is a weary place,
And my pulse is getting low:
But the grace is dark, and the heart will fail,
In reading its gloomy way,
And it wiles my heart from its dreariness;
Too see the young so gay."