But you will find eloquent and pointed statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us--the expression of ordinary human nature-- "What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest," "Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review of Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn." Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they cultivated it.

They were not realists as all good romanticists have to be.

They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions.

They loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail.

They liked the broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression, rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself.
Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that the ascending spirit of humanity can find a better means of self-expression.