nd 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.'

To Emerson, at this moment, numbers looked with the deepest admiration
or with fiercest hate. He was the type of his age, what Carlyle might
perhaps call its 'Priest Vates.' In his _Essays_ he stood aloft and
proclaimed, 'In me is the kernel of truth: eat and live!' But the shell
that enclosed the kernel was hard to crack, and was, moreover, like the
'Sileni' of the old French apothecaries, as described by Rabelais, so
decorated with wondrous figures, harpies, satyrs, horned geese and
bridled hares, that men were incredulous, and doubted that precious
ambergris, musk and gems were to be found within. In his first
crudities, fyttes and tilts with thought, both knight and field are
covered with a cloth of gold so dazzling that the crystalline lenses of
our common vision are in danger of dissolution, and we vainly hope for
page or dame who will whisper to us the magic word that shall dispel
this scene of enchantment. Meanwhile, his sentences, like arrows, darken
that sun, himself, and we hasten with bits of smoked glass to view the
eclipse. Happily, we have chosen the right medium: the luminousness is
destroyed, but the opaqueness remains visible. Entrenched behind a
mannerism so adroitly constructed as at once to invite and repel
invasion, Emerson hurls out axioms and establishes precedents that prove
upon examination to be either admirably varnished editions of old truths
or statements of new ones of questionable legitimacy. Turn over leaf by
leaf these early essays, and doubts arise as to the validity of the
author's claim to originality. Carlyle has led before these pompous
parades of moral truths that your child r