"Richmond's Messenger attempted to cut down both Coleridge and Emerson, with one swing of the scythe, in a review of the latter's Essays. The review argued that the bulk of Americans who admired the two philosophers were 'ambitious school boys of the metaphysical turn of mind'. The Virginia critic smugly conceded that some grown men might like Coleridge and Emerson, also, but that their number would not 'much exceed the number of the present House of Representatives, that is about one for every seventy-thousand of the population of the country.'"
-- Citation from the Southern Literary Messenger, XVIII (April, 1852), in Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, Rollin Osterweis, 1949, p. 39-40.
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