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124 peculiarity in their habits as long as there was originality in their characters.

It was during this visit of the two poets at Coppet that Karl Ritter appeared for a short time on the scene. He enjoyed a great reputation in Germany, being considered as the inventor of the Science of Comparative Geography. He was also a gentle, earnest man, and became extremely religious in his old age. He records an animated, indeed perfervid and amazingly eloquent, speech pronounced before him by Madame de Staël in favour of the metaphysical origin of religion, and in answer to Sismondi who maintained that its basis should be reasoned morality. Madame de Staël declared that religion was the condition of virtue; and that without it there could be no higher life, by which she meant no communion with God. In support of this thesis she displayed the most surprising power both of analysis and illustration, while her logic appearing to Ritter unanswerable, caused the discussion, as he avers, to be an epoch in his intellectual life. This new interest of Madame de Staël in such questions was largely due to the ever-growing influence of Madame de Krüdener, now irrevocably "regenerate" and rapidly rising to fame as a priestess and prophetess, while leading a life of the utmost asceticism. She had been in Coppet again, and had left there the trail of her sacerdotal tendencies. Poor Bonstetten, daily growing younger in mind and heart, was comically disgusted at the change which was coming over the intellectual life of the Château. The confusion of dogmas prevailing could not console him for the fact of there being any dogmas at all. Between Catholics, Boehmists, Martinists, and Mystics, he appeared at times to be quite worn out, and attributed