To form memories about imaginative characters was to have ideas with which one could compare one s own imagination. Forming memories about fictional situations was important to the Romantics because of their desire to build the future with imagination. Once again it was the landscape that held all the imaginary memories in its environs. The joys of Byron and the Shelleys were to travel to the specific places where the fictional characters in Julie lived to recall memories of the character s spirits with ease. Yet the flexibility of the imagination could be applied to any landscape, and even though Byron and the Shelleys remembered Julie and St. Preux at the correct landscapes, any reader of Julie could recall the two lovers by gazing on a lake or at a forest.
Landscapes also represent fictional memories.
It is the universality of natural landscapes that allowed the Romantics to communicate their ideas in a memorable fashion. Romantic landscapes are associated with the imagination because of their distinctly wild and mysterious appearances. Aside from using landscapes with ruins for one to imagine the past, Romantics used landscapes with boundless limits or fantastical features for one to imagine the future. Streaming waterfalls, deep ravines, and soaring mountains were excellent material for imagination metaphors. In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.