idioms, brought the novel sensibility to public attention. A new cultural age had dawned. Literary historians commonly confine the Romantic period to the end of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the next, but it is important to insist that what was novel at that time gathered increasing popularity throughout the Victorian era. Those who formed the vanguard of Romanticism in America, the Transcendentalists, did not make their initial impact until the later 1830s. In England Thomas