The _Essays_ of Emerson were subsequently attacked furiously in the _Princeton Review_ by Prof. Dod and Jas. W. Alexander. These gentlemen gave to the world, as criticisms of Emerson and other writers, several treatises on Pantheism, aiding the very cause they designed to destroy, by disseminating among the religious public a statement of the primitive Philosophy of the Vedas, and its reflection in Germany and America, clearer than any that had yet appeared: a task for which their scholarship and ability eminently fitted them. But in attacking German Philosophy, both learned to respect that which was practically useful in it. Prof. Dod left among his papers an unfinished translation of Spinoza, and the lamented Dr. Alexander, in his admirable lectures on literature to the students of Princeton College, recommended a perusal of what Kant and other German metaphysicians had written on AEsthetics. It is no reflection on the piety or sincerity of these sound divines and ripe scholars that they found something good and useful even in the armory of the enemy. The last step in piety, as in learning, is always to that noble liberality which recognizes Truth and Beauty wherever found. And, while the religious reviews abounded in jeremiads and philippies, the newspaper wits stood outside and shouted in derision. The game was indeed too rare to be passed unnoticed. In a poem on Fanny Ellsler (1841) occurred the following:-- Our wits, as usual, late upon the road, Pick up what Europe saw long since explode. If this you doubt, ask Harvard, she can tell How many fragments there from Deutschland fell; How many mysteries boggle Cambridge men That erst in England boggled Carlyle's pen, And will, no doubt, be mysteries again; And also what great Coleridge left unsung. He, too, saw Germany when very young.'