Romanticism vs. Realism?

I just had an interesting talk with a fellow philosophy friend about the battle between romanticism and realism. For those of you who are unfamiliar with those two terms, I shall explain. Realism is the belief that life must be accepted as the reality we see, we must live according to the good and the bad of life, the world can be understood and rationalized by scientific means. Romanticism is a worldview of living with dreams, hope and passion, throwing caution to the wind and being spontaneous, not being ruled or subdued by the bad things in life, and also not accepting the status quo of reality. I guess you could already tell by the way I described those two extremes, that I am quite a romanticist. I can't just blindly accept the reality of life or the scientific, rational explanations for the way things are. I have to let myself question and search and hope for more, or else I would simply die inside. So, I guess my constant thought is, which of these should we allow to rule our minds? Should we be dreamers, poets and vagabonds our whole lives; or should we seek to make a living, survive in the world, and contribute to the common good of society? Should we be ruled by our emotion or our intellect? Our reason or our faith? Our dreams or reality? The common credo of society or a transcendent hope in something more? I guess I could think like Pascal: "It is not through the arrogant exertion of our reason, but through the humble submission of our reason that we truly come to know ourselves." But then again, he also said: "We are never living, but hoping to live." Did he mean that we are stuck in our realism mindset of simply accepting reality, or does he mean that we are constantly pervaded with a longing for some higher reality? This seems like an eternal question that has been asked countless times throughout history, so I know that I am no closer to an answer than anyone before me. But I just have to simply ask the question of it, the tension of my thoughts and feelings, for as Thomas Merton said: "Questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked."