facts to verify his theories, that he is ready to reject the best authenticated facts, if they would not flow necessarily from his _a priori_ reasoning.' This was severe, too severe in the instance cited; but the remark is worth preserving, as strikingly characteristic of much of the _belles-lettres_ writings of the New School of thinkers, as they were once, and indeed might yet be termed. But impiety was never the result of Transcendentalism. Its advocates endeavored rather to prove the adaptability of a generous and catholic spirit of Philosophy to religion than to subvert it. They never advanced to a love of Strauss and Feuerbach, and men of the second generation, of whom G.H. Lewes may be taken as a type, have generally been regarded by them as the Girondists regarded the Jacobins. Both urge reform, the Vergniaud and the Robespierre, but the one respects the old landmarks, while the other, with an unequaled nonchalance, sweeps by, unconscious of them all, and plants his standard on a foundation as yet unshaken by foot of man. The consequences of the Transcendental movement were truly remarkable. Those latitudes to which habit had accustomed us to look for our _literati_ became one immense hot-house, in which exotics of the most powerful fragrance bloomed luxuriantly.[4] As if by miracle, they assumed hues and adopted habits to which, in their native soil, they had been strangers. Every small _litterateur_ wore conspicuously his cunningly entwined wreath. Ladies appeared at 'aesthetic tea-parties,' crowned with the most delicate of the new importations. Young clergymen were not complete without a flower in their button-holes, and the tables of staid old professors groaned beneath the weight of huge pyramidal bouquets. The cursory examination of foreign literature had given rise to an eclecticism which reflected the distinguishing features of that of Cousin, yet went a step further in daring. Yet this was not an eclecticism that, gifted with the power of a king, the dignity of a priest, and the discernment of a prophet, drew from the treasure-troves of European libraries only their choicest gems. Diamonds, it is true, flashed among the spoils; sapphires and emeralds gleamed; but beside them lay bits of sandstone and scraps of anthracite, rainbow-tinted, perhaps, but of an unconquerable opaqueness. And the alchemy that should have transmuted these to gold, and educed from the one light and from the other majesty, was wanting. A trace of Behmen here, a reading of Cousin's lectures there, some Schiller and more Goethe, some pietism encouraged by a love of Channing, the American Fenelon, some German ballads and a flavor of Plato,--all these helped the initiated to a curious dialect and a curious _melange_. And this was Transcendentalism. The great revelation that the grand Moonsee of the new movement had declared necessary in 1838 had been made; the ninth _avatar_ had descended, and men looked about them for the representative of Krishna,