With a hat tip to Clio, who quotes this in a comment on her blog, I have to pass on this remark by Bertrand Russell: a Romantic is "someone who liberates the tiger from his cage and then admires the graceful leaps with which it devours the spectators."

Of course that doesn't say all there is to say about Romanticism, but it certainly pins down a certain aspect of it, or perhaps I should say a certain danger inherent in it.