The initiator of the romantic poet in England, the editor and sole contributor to magazines unviable, the friend of Wordsworth and Southey, the architect of impossible utopias overseas, the young revolutionary thinker and theologian transmuted into broad church, the teacher who admired personalities as different as Carlyle, Emerson, and Maurice Newman, gives an account of himself in so excited a few pages deep. "The sense of before and after", concludes in his final chapter, "becomes intelligible and has meaning only when we look at the sequence of cause and effect, which both poles of the magnet manifest the unity of a single energy."