Description:
<jats:p>In the spring of 1835, George Ripley, a young Unitarian minister of Boston, remembered an old debt. For some years he had been a leader in that transplantation of German literature and philosophy which was now flowering into Transcendentalism. He could read Kant in the original tongue, and he owned a redoubtable library of German biblical criticism and idealist philosophy. Three years before, in the <jats:italic>Christian Examiner</jats:italic> (<jats:sc>xi</jats:sc>, 375) he had explained the differences between Kant and Coleridge and asserted the superiority of Kant; this very spring he had written for the same journal (<jats:sc>xviii</jats:sc>, 167-221) a biography of Herder and a closely critical review of Marsh's translation of Herder's <jats:italic>Spirit of German Poetry.</jats:italic> But he was still young enough in erudition to remember the names of those who had first turned his eyes to Germany: the Herder article began with a statement of his indebtedness to “sound and liberal scholars, like Carlyle.”</jats:p>