Rousseau’s strong appeal to sentiment voiced during the Enlightenment inspired the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Perhaps the greatest text and writer of the movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) The Sorrows of Young Werther. The most widely read book of the era, Sorrows depicted the passions of the title character, who, after wrestling with feelings of unrequited love, killed himself. Goethe's story of Werther spawned numerous imitators. Many readers dressed in "Werther clothes," and the book even contributed to a rash of suicides. The first selection presents one of the defining characteristics of Romanticism: the love for nature and man's humility before the natural world. The second passage contains many of the hallmarks of Goethe's story and of the Romantic style. Werther engages in a debate with Albert, the fiancée of Lotte, with whom Werther is in love. The two men discuss passion and reason, and Werther recounts the story of a young girl's suicide, foreshadowing his own end.

George Sand was the pen name of Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin (1804-1876). Born and raised in Berry, France, Sand often wrote about this region, as well as the neighboring Bourbonnais, in her works. Sand concentrated on pastoral novels that featured romantic portraits of French peasants. A socialist as well, Sand was horrified by the violence of the 1848 Revolution in France, and sought to express her beliefs for a better, non-violent society through her work. The novel The Master Pipers (1852) addressed this problem and blended Sand's Romantic, political, and feminist beliefs. Set in central France, the novel follows the lives of two peasants from Berry: Tiennet and his cousin, Brulette. A third Berry resident, Joseph, serves as an important focal point of the novel, for his desire to pursue a musical career, as well as his unrequited love for Brulette, establish much of the action of the book. Joining these three are two peasants from Bourbonnais: Huriel and his sister, Therence, whom Brulette and Tiennet marry. The following passage is Sand's ending for her novel, written fron Tiennet's point of view, where she spells out her political and social messages.

Romantic composers such as Frederic Chopin combined the romantic ideas of free expression and emotional intensity in all their music. Music helped to express human feeling in ways that other arts could not. Chopin, a Pole, also lamented Poland's position as part of the Russian nation and exclaimed, "Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!" His Revolutionary Etude, also called "The Fall of Warsaw," included crashing chords that evoked the Poles' desire to free themselves from Russian control.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was in many ways the personification of the Romantic Movement. His controversial and short life mirrored the beliefs expressed in his poetry and that of his contemporaries such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and John Keats (1795-1821). In a letter to a friend, Byron claimed that "poetry is the expression of excited passions," an apt description both of his works and that of his fellow Romantic poets. Byron had a series of romances and in 1824 decided to join the Greek struggle for independence. He died of a fever while in Greece. The following poem, "Fare Thee Well," contains opening lines from Coleridge and is Byron's ode to the end of a relationship.

The English landscape artist Joseph Turner (1775-1851), along with his contemporary John Constable (1776-1837), painted a series of works that focused on nature and its power. Constable declared that "Nature is spirit visible," a claim that both he and Turner attempted to capture in their art. Turner focused on nature's power and terror, and his paintings often included wild storms and sinking ships. His work "Snowstorm, Steamboat Off a Harbour's Mouth" serves as an artistic counterpart to Beethoven's music above. To paint this work, Turner tied himself to a ship's mast and braved a storm for four hours.

One of the most powerful early examples of nationalism as a political faith was the call by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) for Italians to join his "Young Italy" movement. The Italian peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century consisted of a number of city-states and small countries, and Mazzini argued that Italians should unite on the basis of shared traditions, culture, and history--appeals that nationalists from other countries would articulate.

The Romantic and Nationalist movements led to investigations about the "national spirit" of individual countries. One manifestation of this interest resulted in the collection of folk poems, songs, and tales that illustrated the unique qualities of a nation. The most famous example of such collecting was the fairy tales edited by Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm published between 1812 and 1818. These tales attempted to document the spirit of the German people, who were at the time living in the scattered states of the German Confederation. The tales mixed morality, magic, and even gore in an attempt to illustrate a sense of Germanness.

The desire to form a single German state inspired many artists to write odes dedicated to this end. In 1840, a businessman named Max Schneckenburger wrote "Watch on the Rhine." Schneckenburger believed that the French threatened to overrun the left bank of the Rhine River, the traditional geographic divide between France and Germany. His stanzas to defend the Rhine became particularly popular during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which in turn led to the establishment of a German state. Schneckenburger's song became the national anthem of Germany and later returned to vogue under the Nazis (most Americans know the tune from the film "Casablanca," where Nazi troops sing it in Rick's bar).

Vuk Karadzic (1787-1864), born in Serbia to a family of Montenegrin descent, is best known for the Serbian folk songs and stories he collected and published, which aided the development of the modern Serbian language. His career and contributions parallel those of several of his contemporaries who engaged in similar efforts, from the Grimm brothers and Goethe in Germany to Pushkin in Russia--in fact, Jacob Grimm advised Karadzic about collecting folklore and Goethe translated some of his collection. One of the most famous songs published by Karadzic, and among the most important expressions of Serbian national identity, was "The Fall of the Serbian Empire." The song revolved around the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 and the myths surrounding this battle, when the Turks defeated the Serbian Prince Lazar. According to this version of the encounter, Prince Lazar had to choose between an earthly kingdom or a heavenly one for his people, and chose the latter, ensuring defeat on the field of battle but a privileged position for his Serbian people.

Russian intellectuals engaged in a spirited debate about their nation throughout the nineteenth century. Two major camps emerged in this debate: the "Westernizers," who believed that Russia should continue to develop along a Western European model, a fulfillment in part of Peter the Great’s reforms; and "Slavophiles," who believed in the ability of Russia to develop through its older traditions, particularly Orthodoxy. In 1847, Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), the celebrated author of Dead Souls and The Inspector General, published a collection of letters in which he defended Orthodoxy, autocracy, and even serfdom. In response, Gogol's former sponsor and ardent Westernizer, Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), wrote a scathing critique of Gogol's views. Belinsky declared that Russia would find her salvation only in "in the advances of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity." Moreover, Belinsky criticized Gogol for failing to use his position as a writer to advocate these goals for Russian society.

Composed for the opening of the 1882 Moscow Exhibition, which coincided with the 80th anniversary of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture immediately was hailed as a masterpiece. Although the composer himself described the piece as "very noisy" and "lacking in artistic merit," contemporaries believed that Tchaikovsky's overture captured the spirit of Russia's victory in 1812. The piece has since become one of the most recognizable examples of nationalism in music.

The eminent nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan wrote one of the most famous explanations of nationhood in 1882, amid a crisis of French national identity brought on by defeat to Prussia in 1871. Renan famously declared that the nation is a soul, a spiritual principle, and that it is sustained by a daily plebiscite.

Scholars of nationalism have written an impressive body of work over the last few decades. One of the most preeminent of the historians of European nationalism, Eric Hobsbawm, argues in the following passage that nations and nationalism belong to a particular, and historically recent, period. Hobsbawm's theories of nationalism have influenced many historians and have framed the debates over the origins of nations.

Adrian Hastings challenges Hobsbawm's thesis that nationalism emerged only in the wake of the French Revolution. According to Hastings, nationhood was constructed "bit by bit" long before then and had its roots in the development of vernacular languages and in religion.