the realm of letters. It is yet impossible to estimate
either the present value or the remote issues of the work which he has
accomplished. We see that a revolution in all the departments of
thought, feeling, and literary enterprise has been silently achieved
amongst us, but we are yet ignorant of its full bearing, and of the
final goal to which it is hurrying us. One thing, however, is clear
respecting it: that it was not forced in the hot-bed of any possible
fanaticism, but that it grew fairly out of the soil, a genuine product
of the time and its circumstances. It was, indeed, a new manifestation
of the hidden forces and vitalities of what we call Protestantism,--an
assertion by the living soul of its right to be heard once more in a
world which seemed to ignore its existence, and had set up a ghastly
skeleton of dry bones for its oracle and God. It was that necessary
return to health, earnestness, and virtuous endeavor which Kreeshna
speaks of in the Hindoo Geeta: "Whenever vice and corruption have
sapped the foundations of the world, and men have lost their sense of
good and evil, I, Kreeshna, make myself manifest for the restoration
of order, and the establishment of justice, virtue, and piety." And so
this literary revolution, of which we are speaking, brought us from
frivolity to earnestness, from unbelief and all the dire negations
which it engenders, to a sublime faith in human duty and the
providence of God.

We have no room here to trace either the foreign or the native
influences which, operating as antagonism or as inspiration upon the
minds of Coleridge, Carlyle, and others, produced finally these great
and memorable results. It is but justice, however, to recognize
Coleridge as the pioneer of the new era. His fine metaphysical
intellect and grand imagination, nurtured and matured in the German
schools of philosophy and theology, reproduced the speculations of
their great thinkers in a form and coloring which could not fail to be
attractive to all seeking and sincere minds in England. The French
Revolution and the Encyclopedists had already prepared the ground for
the reception of new thought and revelation. Hence Coleridge, as
writer and speaker, drew towards his centre all the young and ardent
men of his time,--and among others, the subject of the present
article. Carlyle, however, does not seem to have profited much by the
spoken discourses of the master; and in his "Life of Sterling" he
gives an exc