But the contrary was
the result. A pietism the very reverse was developed, which, aided by
the beloved Channing, was disseminated through New England. Justice
Story even asserted that in Unitarianism he found refuge from the
skepticism to which in youth he had tended.

Permitted, by the liberal character of the welcome substitute for a
theology that had become too stringent for the age, to prosecute their
researches into fields hitherto forbidden to the orthodox, thinkers,
economists, statesmen and theologians gathered round the standard, and a
new impulse was given to the intellectual character of the times. A
revolution in Thought was impending.

In Literature we dared challenge the nations. The popularity of Cooper
was at its high noon. Irving, with the graphic and delicate strokes of
his sympathetic pencil, had written himself the Claude Lorraine among
_litterateurs_; and Prescott, with his sentences of granite, was
building himself an immortal name. Still, we were behind Germany, and
even France, in that wide comprehension and universal criticism that
determines more accurately than its politics the real _status_ of a
nation. These elements were now to be supplied. Carlyle had played in
England the _role_ so humorously yet thoroughly enacted in Germany by
Heine, and so gracefully and airily performed in France by Cousin. He
had _popularized_ the philosophers. Without the acute, electric
perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of
that De Sevigne among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce
dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant
British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the
age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose.
In a word, he familiarized his readers with the _AEsthetik_ of Germany.
He published in 1830 his _Sartor Resartus_, which, clothing the man in
'_der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid_,' usurped for him at once an office not
inferior to that of the _Erd-geist_ in _Faust_. The shrill notes of the
bagpipe of the critic of Craigenputtock blew across the mountains and
valleys of his island home, rousing the judge on the bench, and,
penetrating the long halls of Cambridge and Oxford, streamed yet
distinct and powerful to our shores. Astonished by the richness and
fullness of a literature so comprehensive, which seemed to inclose in
its brilliant mazes all that their meagre and unfruitful dogmas de