XX. Yes, and when Thomas Moore, in one of his many kissing lyrics, celebrates the same kind of "sweet abandonment" ("The Kiss," 1801), he marks the close relation between eros and madness that Romanticism perceives and pursues. A great theme of Romantic culture, madness is the index of thwarted desire. Writers of the period fashion a poetry of madness in order to gain (paradoxically but precisely) the ''controlless core" (Byron,
Don Juan
I, stanza 116) of imaginative abandonment. Demon lovers and desperate brains: both are familiar Romantic tropes, and while the one descends into the culture largely through the propagators of the ballad revival, the other is the offspring of those sentimentalist projects and writers you seem to favor.
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In each case, a grammar of the fantastical is deployed in order to express what would be difficult or impossible to say otherwise. A pair of this period's early and influential writers, M. G. Lewis and Charlotte Smith, exemplify these two grammars very well, as we can see in this sonnet by Smith (1797):
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 | | Sonnet. On being Cautioned against Walking
on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, because
it was Frequented by a Lunatic
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| | Is there a solitary wretch who hies
To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-borne gale with frequent sighs
Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies
Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
I see him more with envy than with fear;
He
has no
nice felicities
that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.
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A machinery of transferred epithets, Smith's sonnet gradually measures a series of figural reflections between the seascape, the lunatic, and Smith herself. But even as these identifications culminate in the ambiguous grammar opening the sestet, Smith unfolds a glimpse of
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