Affiliations were multiplied _ad infinitum_. Prejudice, as it always occurs when zeal is ardent, was added fraudulently to truth, as if error or falsehood were the inevitable alloy of truth, and even the virtues of the human mind: they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak. They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm. The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions. On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such tests, and was worked upon by wonders. Kings conspired against thrones. The princes of Gotha gave Weishaupt an asylum. Augustus of Saxony, prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, the prince of Neuvied, even the coadjutor of the ecclesiastical principalities on the banks of the Rhine, those of Mayence, Worms, and Constance, signalised themselves by their ardour for the mystic doctrines of freemasonry or the illuminati. Cagliostro was astounding Strasburgh--Cardinal de Rohan ruined himself, and bent before his voice. Like at the fall of great empires--like at the cradle of great things--these signs appeared every where. The most infallible was the general convulsion of human ideas. When a creed is crumbling to atoms, all mankind trembles. The lofty geniuses of Germany and Italy were already singing the new era to their offspring; Goeethe the sceptic poet, Schiller the republican poet, Klopstock the sacred poet, intoxicated with their strophes the universities and theatres; each shock of the events of Paris had its _contre coup_ and sonorous echo, multiplied by these writers on the borders of the Rhine. Poetry is the remembrance and anticipation of things: what it celebrates is not yet dead, and what it sings already hath existence. Poetry sang everywhere the unformed but impassioned hopes of the people. It is a sure augury--it is full of enthusiasm, for its voice is heard on all sides; science, poetry, history, philosophy, the stage, mysticism, the arts, the genius of Europe under every form, had passed over to the Revolution: not one name of a man of reputation in all Europe could be cited who remained attached to the party of the past. The past was overcome, because the mind of the human race had withdrawn from it--when the spirit hath flown life is extinct. None but mediocrities remain under the shelter of old forms and institutions: There was a general mirage in the horizon of the future; and, whether the small saw therein their safety, or the great an abyss, all went headlong towards the novelty. XII.