But at last there comes a man capable of dispensing with the form,--a man endowed with a high degree of the intuitive faculty,--a born seer, a prophet, seeing the great realities of the universe with open vision. The work of such a man is to break up the old formulas and introduce new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years ago by the writings of Coleridge; for the Unitarians in this vicinity, by the writings of Thomas Carlyle. This was the secret of the enthusiasm felt for Carlyle, in those days, by so many of the younger men and women. He taught us to look at realities instead of names, at substance instead of surface,--to see God in the world, in nature, in life, in providence, in man,--to see divine truth and beauty and wonder everywhere around. He taught that the only organ necessary by which to see the divine in all things was sincerity, or inward truth. And so he enabled us to escape from the form into the spirit, he helped us to rise to that plane of freedom from which we could see the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, God in man, heaven on earth, immortality beginning here, eternity pervading time. This made for us a new heaven and a new earth, a new religion and a new life. Faith was once more possible, a faith not bought by the renunciation of mature reason or the beauty and glory of the present hour. But all this was taught us by our new prophet, not by the intellect merely, but by the spirit in which he spoke. He did not seem to be giving us a new creed, so much as inspiring us with a new life. That which came from his experience went into ours. Therefore it might have been difficult, in those days, for any of his disciples to state what it was that they had learned from him. They had not learned his doctrine,--they had absorbed it. Hence, very naturally, came the imitations of Carlyle, which so disgusted the members of the old school. Hence the absurd Carlylish writing, the feeble imitations by honest, but weak disciples of the great master. It was a pity, but not unnatural, and it soon passed by. As Carlyle thus did his work, not so much by direct teaching as by an influence hidden in all that he said, it did not much matter on what subject he wrote,--the influence was there still. But his articles on Goethe were the most attractive, because he asserted that in this patriarch of German literature he had found one who saw in all things their real essence, one whose majestic and trained intelligence could interpret to us in all parts of nature and life the inmost quality, the _terza essenza_, as the Italian Platonists called it, which made each itself. Goethe was announced as the prophet of Realism. He, it should seem, had perfectly escaped from words into things. He saw the world, not through dogmas, traditions, formulas, but as it was in itself. To him "the world's unwithered countenance Was fresh as on creation's day."