Panic hardens into pessimism; or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.
Carlyle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all this by the mental interval between his "French Revolution" and his "Frederick the Great." In both he was Germanic.

Carlyle was really as sentimental as Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental as Werther.
Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that it was a French revolution.

He could not conceive that cold anger that comes from a love of insulted truth.

It seemed to him absurd that a man should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge.

But anyone who does not understand that does not understand the French Revolution--nor, for that matter, the American Revolution.