Geysers erupt to Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” Waterfalls cascade from vertiginous crags. Horses cavort in surf and flame. Just some of the feverish iconography of “The Romantic Spirit” (1982).

So earnest at times, you could swear you’re watching a Monty Python parody, “The Romantic Spirit” is as overheated as those it celebrates – the late 18th/early 19th century revolutionaries in art, politics, and life who pushed emotional intensity beyond the breaking point.

The line-up at the beginning of each episode reminds us of some of the firebrands of the movement, as the names of Beethoven, Berlioz, Byron, Chateaubriand, Chopin, Delacroix, Goethe, Hugo, Novalis, Schiller, Schubert, Schumann, and Shelley sweep inexorably toward the viewer. British thespian Anthony Andrews hosts “from the house of John Keats, Hampstead, London.” Among the readers who recite passages from seething letters and florid literary works is Derek Jacobi. It’s a heady mix of declamation, painting, music, and reenactment. Part one concludes with an epic artgasm, those ubiquitous geysers exploding to Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique.”

At the time I first viewed this series, rising early to catch it on A&E, I was still in my early 20s – the Romantic wheelhouse. Looking back on it now, in middle age, my heart continues to beat in sympathy, and I wonder how the hell it was that I didn’t die defending Greece from the Turks, of consumption, of an opium overdose, or of a pistol ball to the temple.

If the series was ever issued commercially on DVD in the U.S., I do not know of it. There seems to be no trace of it in the listings of either online retailers or e-commerce websites. The only reason I own it is because a good friend of mine ordered it for me once, from one of those underground archivists who had the foresight to videotape everything, and now burns it on demand onto DVD-Rs in his basement.

To be honest, the quality is not much better than what you will find on YouTube. But when I received them, and for years after, they were nowhere else to be found.

Give me a troupe of classically-trained British actors, spouting quotes, reciting poems, and intoning the names of Romantic icons, and I am as happy as Caspar David Friedrich gazing through withered trees at a beguiling moon.