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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
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