The hidden agents of these societies had evidently for aim the creation of a government of the opinion of the human race, in opposition to the governments of prejudice.  They desired to reform religious, political, and civil society, beginning by the most refined classes.  These lodges were the catacombs of a new worship.  The sect of illumines, founded and guided by Weishaupt, was spreading in Germany in conjunction with the freemasons and the rosicrucians.  The theosophists in their turn produced the symbols of supernatural perfection, and enrolled all susceptible minds and ardent imaginations around dogmata full of love and infinity.  The theosophists, the Swedenborgians, disciples of the sublime but obscure Swedenborg, the Saint Martin of Germany, pretended to complete the Gospel, and to transform humanity by overcoming death and the senses.  All these dogmata were mingled in an equal contempt for existing institutions in one same aspiration for the renewal of the mind and things.  All were democratic in their last conclusion, for all were inspired by a love of mankind without distinction of classes.

Affiliations were multiplied ad infinitum.  Prejudice, as it always occurs when zeal is ardent, was added fraudulently to truth, as if error or falsehood were the inevitable alloy of truth, and even the virtues of the human mind:  they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak.  They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm.  The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions.  On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such tests, and was worked upon by wonders.  Kings conspired against thrones.  The princes of Gotha gave Weishaupt an asylum.  Augustus of Saxony, prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, the prince of Neuvied, even the coadjutor of the ecclesiastical principalities on the banks of the Rhine, those of Mayence, Worms, and Constance, signalised themselves by their ardour for the mystic doctrines of freemasonry or the illuminati.  Cagliostro was astounding Strasburgh—­Cardinal de Rohan ruined himself, and bent before his voice.  Like at the fall of great empires—­like at the cradle of great things—­these signs appeared every where.  The most infallible was the general convulsion of human ideas.  When a creed is crumbling to atoms, all mankind trembles.

The lofty geniuses of Germany and Italy were already singing the new era to their offspring; Goeethe the sceptic poet, Schiller the republican poet, Klopstock the sacred poet, intoxicated with their strophes the universities and theatres; each shock of the events of Paris had its contre coup and sonorous echo, multiplied by these writers on the borders of the Rhine.  Poetry is the remembrance and anticipation of things:  what it celebrates is not yet dead, and what it sings already hath existence.  Poetry