Werner had had a _Sturm und Drang_ period of extreme dissipation, had taken to Freemasonry, and imbibed, apparently, some of the ideas of the Illuminati; and, besides his mysticism in religion, inclined to socialism in politics. After all this vagueness of thought, joined to a highly impressionable and very vivid temperament, it is not surprising to learn that he eventually became a Roman Catholic priest and rose to great renown as a preacher. Oehlenschläger has left a spiteful picture of Werner, with his nose full of snuff, discussing his esoteric doctrines in an execrable patois which was intended for French. Both poets, however, united in admiring and praising, almost worshipping, Madame de Staël, and she on her side seems to have cared little for any peculiarity in their habits as long as there was originality in their characters. It was during this visit of the two poets at Coppet that Karl Ritter appeared for a short time on the scene. He enjoyed a great reputation in Germany, being considered as the inventor of the Science of Comparative Geography. He was also a gentle, earnest man, and became extremely religious in his old age. He records an animated, indeed perfervid and amazingly eloquent, speech pronounced before him by Madame de Staël in favor of the metaphysical origin of religion, and in answer to Sismondi who maintained that its basis should be reasoned morality. Madame de Staël declared that religion was the condition of virtue; and that without it there could be no higher life, by which she meant no communion with God. In support of this thesis she displayed the most surprising power both of analysis and illustration, while her logic appearing to Ritter unanswerable, caused the discussion, as he avers, to be an epoch in his intellectual life. This new interest of Madame de Staël in such questions was largely due to the ever-growing influence of Madame de Krüdener, now irrevocably “regenerate” and rapidly rising to fame as a priestess and prophetess, while leading a life of the utmost asceticism. She had been in Coppet again, and had left there the trail of her sacerdotal tendencies. Poor Bonstetten, daily growing younger in mind and heart, was comically disgusted at the change which was coming over the intellectual life at the Château. The confusion of dogmas prevailing could not console him for the fact of there being any dogmas at all. Between Catholics, Boehmists, Martinists and Mystics, he appeared at times to be quite worn out, and attributed the whole revolution to the influence of his pet aversion Schlegel. How he made this out is not very clear, for the theological spirit was as cosmopolitan in its representatives as varied in its forms. Mathieu de Montmorency was a Catholic, somebody else a Quietist, a third an Illuminist, while Rationalism was left to the doubtful prowess of Baron Voght, who was reported by Bonstetten to be as gyratory in his opinions as a weathercock.