A worldview is very much what it sounds like it would be--a certain way of seeing the world. Worldviews can be grounded in a focus that is artistic, economic, political, and many others, but they are all essentially philosophical. For example, two prevalent worldviews in today's politics are liberal and conservative. Though these terms are not very well defined, they attempt to describe two different ways that people not only think the world should be, but two ways they think it is. There is no easy right or wrong answer because there are different versions of reality. Most major worldviews have also had their share of artistic and literary adherents, and the Romantic worldview of the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century was no exception. This worldview was typified by a re-examination of man's place in relationship to nature. Some of the beliefs of the Romantic worldview include the ideas that nature, though chaotic, s also eternal and unstoppable, and that therefore mankind (as a part of nature) is incapable of acting against it, and that misery of most types is attributable to un-natural attempts. I am not a Romantic because it does not take human ingenuity and cognitive capabilities fully into account.
             One of the defining characteristics of the Romantic worldview is that Nature has an infinite quality to it, both in size and time, and that this infinity is the cause of our feelings of awe and mortal fear. This first part is one of Romanticism's most common assertions--it must be accepted as fact before the second part of it can be claimed. Two prime examples of this come from the American Transcendentalist poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. In Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," various images, including that of a traveler, are set against the monotonous repetition of "the tide rises, the tide falls." The poem suggests the fu...