In the midst of the stormiest days of his career at the Collège de France, we find Edgar Quinet plunged in the Essays of Emerson. The striking example of a great French teacher and reformer taking refuge in the writings of the Concord philosopher, then practically unknown, during so violent and eventful an academic year as was 1844–45, is clearly shown in Quinet's lectures and commonplace book of that same period. Doubtless he found in the pages of the American essayist at this trying period both inspiration and solace. Little wonder, then, that he proclaimed enthusiastically to his auditors at the Collège de France that America had given birth to an original philosophy; and furthermore, that Emerson “was the most idealistic writer of our time.”