the most poetic flights. My friends and I, while
originating in 1827 one of the leading periodicals of the age, the
'Revue Francaise,' selected for its motto this verse of Ovid,--

"Et quod nunc ratio est, impetus ante fuit:"--

"What is now reason, was at first an impulse of passion."

We thus truly conveyed the prevailing spirit around us, and our own
personal conviction. The 'Revue Francaise' was devoted to philosophy,
history, literary criticism, and moral and scientific lucubrations; at
the same time it was impregnated with the grand political inspirations
which for forty years had agitated France. We declared ourselves
distinct from our precursors of 1789, strangers to their passions, and
not enslaved to their ideas, but inheritors and continuators of their
work. We undertook to bring back the new French society to purer
principles, to more elevated and equitable sentiments, and to firmer
foundations; to that great subject of interest, to the accomplishment of
its legitimate hopes and the assurance of its liberties, our efforts and
desires were incessantly directed.

Another miscellany, commenced in 1824, and more popular than the
'Revue'--the 'Globe'--bore the same features in a polemic of greater
animation and variety. Some young doctrinarians, associated with other
writers of the same class, and animated by the same spirit, although
with primary ideas and ultimate tendencies of a very different
character, were the ordinary editors. Their distinguishing symbols were,
in philosophy, spiritualism; in history, intelligent inquiry, impartial
and even sympathetic as regarded ancient times and the progressive
conditions of human society; in literature, a taste for novelty,
variety, liberty, and truth, even under the strangest forms and the most
incongruous associations. They defended, or rather advanced their banner
with the ardour and pride of youth; enjoying, in their attempts at
philosophical, historical, poetical, and critical reform, the
satisfaction, at once personal and disinterested, which forms the
sweetest reward of intellectual activity; and promising themselves, as
always happens, a too extensive and too easy success. Two faults were
mingled with these generous aspirations: the ideas developed in the
'Globe' were deficient in a fixed basis and a defined limit; their form
was more decided than their foundation; they exhibited minds animated by
a noble impulse, but not directed to any single or certai