Just as European Romanticism did not emerge suddenly in 1798, it did not end abruptly in 1848. Any rigid temporal limits that would exclude, say, Die Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797; appeared 1796) of Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck or, at the other extreme, Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (1857) would restrict our understanding of the movement. Music historians sometimes extend the boundaries more liberally than scholars of literature and art in order to encompass Richard Wagner, whose “Bühnenweihfestspiel” Parsifal was first performed in 1882—and even Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, whose works move well into the twentieth century. Other musicologists warn that any such extension “requires diluting its meaning so much that it ceases to be useful.”

Despite all the arguments about dates, most studies assume tighter limits. The useful Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 sets an earlier starting point “in order to include many of those developments seen as transitional” but assumes that its end date will be less contentious. Charles Rosen's study of Romanticism in music begins more or less with Beethoven and Schubert and extends to Schumann. Kenneth Clark's assessment of “Romantic versus Classic Art,” while looking both backward and forward, focuses his attention on artists between Goya and Constable. And William Vaughn, in German Romantic Painting, concentrates on “The Painter's Germany, 1800–50.”

If we had sought to add the year 1858 to our stages, it would have included works of a conspicuously different nature, none of which are normally associated with Romanticism: for instance, George Eliot's first publication, the three stories of her Scenes of Clerical Life; Alfonse Daudet's first collection of poems, Les amoureuses; and Wilhelm Raabe's first novel, Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, which is routinely categorized as “bourgeois realism.” These three works, which as “firsts” suggest the beginning of a new literary epoch rather than the end of an older one, might have been bookended by Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orphée aux enfers, which is best known today for the galop that is popularly called “can-can”; and by Édouard Manet's early pre-impressionist painting Boy with Cherries. In any case, that year could hardly have been regarded as another stage of European Romanticism.