Lit. Antonio Hitchcock
American Romanticism 9/3/’06
The sketch book RIP Van Winkle is a tail about a man who sleeps for twenty years. I feel that every story teaches a lesson to be learned and the lesson in this one is to take every minute of your life with care. In this story Van Winkle takes his time with everyone and everything else but his self. He finds his self lost in mountains with strangers drinking till he fell asleep. When he wore up he was twenty years older and the only people that know him was his daughter and an old lady. That his whole life was almost over in a night and now he has to live in a world he hardy even knew anymore.

The sketch book RIP Van Winkle is a story that lives up to its name. Rest in peace Van Winkle for your life is over and you never took any time out for your self. I like this story because people sometimes forget their self and only been living doing things they take for granted. Like Van Winkle who lived tell stories and helping people out as if he was born to do so. He had a wife and child of his own to be taking care of let alone his neighbor.

What I found romantic in this story is that Van Winkle still had someone he knew and loved like his daughter, his neighbor and dog which didn’t know him anymore. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. "My very dog," sighed poor Rip, "has forgotten me!" Rip's daughter took him home to live with herAs to Rip's son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to any thing else but his business. "Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle--it is himself! Welcome home again, an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, old neighbor--Why, where have you been these twenty long years?"

In Thanatopsis I believe this poem is saying there is peace within death and no sadness nor pain or remorse. In this poem a man is on his death bed waiting for this gentle reaper to take him in that won't be his last ride, but the begining of a new. Thy image. Earth, that hourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolv'd to earth again; What I found romantic about this poem is how the author makes something like death to be a beautifull transfromation form life to death and from death to life all over again in the cycle of life. That in death there should be no sadness but rejoices for all things have a beginning and end and that each transformation should be love and respected.

In The Ropewalk the author finds peace at work using his imagnation. The images that stick out to me is the characher imagation; human spiders spining their spin, two young women in a swing, then an woman high up the air on a cord in a mountebanks, a woman drawing water form a well, a man in a tower ringing a bell, a prison yard with hard faces at a gallows-tree, a school boy with his kite, Steeds pursued through a lane and field, duck hunters with their snares concealed, a person fishing by a river, and finialy a ship draging anchor through faithless sand. What I can find romantic about this poem is how the author uses his imagation to up his sprit from a boring day of work.

Like your picture, here I too see romanticism in my picture. It’s something that doesn’t deal with anything but the art of nature. Here in my picture humans are at one nature living on the mountain side. I pick this picture because you can’t get any better than this when it come to romanticism. Just it’s scenery is what I would call a good definition of romanticism not romantic, but in a way it can seem romantic if you where some of the people living there.