I thank Joseph Bizup, Patrick LeBeau, Gregory Garvey, Ralph Potter, Stephen Rachman, and Bruce Weiner for their advice and suggestions.

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7. See Numbers, Ronald L., Creation by Natural Law: Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Lane might also have been thinking of the spectacular comet whose appearance over America, in February 1843 had been widely noted, thereby stimulating popular interest in astronomy (see Nye, Russel Blaine, Society and Culture in America, 1830–1860 [New York: Harper and Row, 1974], 28)Google Scholar. The range of uses to which the star figure was put in antebellum America is cogently documented by White, Craig Howard (“Natural Law and National Science: The ‘Star of Empire’ in Manifest Destiny and the American Observatory Movement,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 20 [1995]: 119–60)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although White does consider the use of celestial figures in a handful of antebellum literary texts, he fails to acknowledge their more pervasive presence in the era's critical discourse.

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11. Monthly Jubilee (March 1854): 87, quoted in George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854, ed. Reynolds, David (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 9Google Scholar; “Carlyle's History of the French Revolution,” New Yorker 4 (03 1838): 813Google Scholar; “Life of the Author,” in The Select Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Boston: Philips, Sampson, 1851), 6Google Scholar; Hunt, Jedidiah, Bainbridge Eagle, 04 29, 1845Google Scholar, quoted in The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849, comp. Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 529Google Scholar; Emerson, Ralph Waldo, English Raits, ed. Nicoloff, Philip, Burkholder, Robert E., and Wilson, Douglas Emory, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5:5–6Google Scholar; and “The New Timon: A Romance of London,” Southern Literary Messenger 13 (1847): 81Google Scholar.

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13. On the use of organicism in romantic critical discourse, see Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 167–225Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 167.

15. Lane, , “A. Bronson Alcott's Works,” 421Google Scholar.

16. [Briggs, Charles F.], “Mind Among the Spindles,” Broadway Journal 1 (1845): 2Google Scholar.

17. Whipple, , “Genius,” 160–61Google Scholar.

18. Brumm, Ursula, American Thought and Religious Typology, trans. Hoagland, John (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 27Google Scholar. See also Auerbach, Erich, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Manheim, Ralph (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76Google Scholar; Manning, Stephen, “Scriptural Exegesis and the Literary Critic,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 47–66Google Scholar; and Shurr, William, “Typology and Historical Criticism of the American Renaissance,” ESQ 20 (1974): 57–63Google Scholar.

19. On the use of typology as an ideological tool, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, and The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 40–65Google Scholar.

20. See, for example, Thayer, William M., The Morning Star; or, Symbols of Christ (Boston: Crown, 1857), 7–29, 79Google Scholar; and Cummins, Maria Susanna, The Lamplighter (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854), passimGoogle Scholar. Jonathan Edwards had earlier used this image in his Images of Divine Things: “The heaven's being filled with glorious, luminous bodies, is to signify the glory and happiness of the heavenly inhabitants; and among these, the sun signifies Christ and the moon, the church” (Typological Works, ed. Anderson, Wallace E., Lowance, Mason I., and Watters, David H., in The Works of Jonathan Edwards [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 11: 52Google Scholar). For Scriptural sources, see Matt. 2: 2, 7; 2 Pet. 1: 19; and Rev. 2: 28.

21. “Thomas Carlyle,” Chicago Evening Journal, 02 5, 1881, 2Google Scholar. Cf. Matt. 2: 1–12.

22. George Ripley to Thomas Carlyle, June 1, 1835, quoted in Slater, Joseph, “George Ripley and Thomas Carlyle,” PMLA 67 (1952): 343–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. James Gates Percival to George Hayward, January 9, 1828, in Ward, Julius H., The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 288–89Google Scholar. Percival was perhaps thinking of his own celestial elevation here; three years earlier, the Shakespearean Society of Boston had made a toast to “American Poets — Bryant, Percival, and Sprague — the belt of Orion in our literary horizon” (quoted in New York Mirror and Ladies' Literary Gazette, April 29, 1826).

24. Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 72 n. 118Google Scholar; and Willis, Nathaniel P., “The West in a Petticoat,” in Complete Works (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1846), 771Google Scholar. More generally, see the learned discussion by White in “Natural Law.”

25. Esther Mack to Sarah Hodges, December 16, 1842, quoted in Capper, Charles, “Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston,” American Quarterly 39 (1987): 519CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27. Willis, , “Ephemera,” in Complete Works, 694Google Scholar; Grimstead, David, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 92–93Google Scholar; [Snelling], “Decline of Modern Drama,” 105; and Walsh, Robert, “American Drama,” quoted in The American Literary Revolution, 1783–1837, ed. Spiller, Robert E. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1967), 327Google Scholar.

28. [Snelling, William Joseph], Truth: A New Year's Gift for Scribblers (Boston: Printed by Stephen Foster, 1831), 39, 50Google Scholar.

29. As antebellum critics were quick to point out, Carlyle's scholarship on German literature made him a canonizer as much as one of those canonized. According to one anonymous reviewer, “The glorious galaxy of contemporary [German] genius was not visible to our eyes. Carlyle has made it apparent” (see “The Loiterer,” Arcturus 2 [06 1841]: 66Google Scholar).

30. John Quincy Adams to John Adams, [November] 1804, quoted in Banner, James M., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 75Google Scholar.

31. “Germanic Infections: Dr. Channing,” Knickerbocker 14 (07 1839): 90Google Scholar.

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34. Poe, Edgar Allan, “Our Amateur Poets. No. III — William Ellery Channing,” Graham's Magazine 23 (08 1843): 110Google Scholar.

35. Duyckinck, Evert, “The Uncle Tom Epidemic,” Literary World 11 (12 1852): 355Google Scholar. Stowe herself was not above using this trope, penning an article entitled “Literary Epidemics — No. 2” in the New-York Evangelist 14 (07 13, 1843): 109Google Scholar. See the discussion in Hedrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 156–57Google Scholar.

36. Quoted in Nye, , Society and Culture, 89Google Scholar. The following year, he referred to “a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name ‘Jane Eyre fever’” (Whipple, E. P., “Novels of the Season,” North American Review 67 [10 1848]: 355Google Scholar).

37. For examples of antebellum invocations of cacoethes scribendi, see Willis, , “The Pay for Periodical-Writing,” in Complete Works, 723Google Scholar; Poe, Edgar Allan, “Rufus Dawes: A Retrospective Criticism” [1842], in Essays and Reviews, ed. Thompson, G. R. (New York: Library of America, 1984), 495Google Scholar; and Sedgwick, Catharine, “Cacoethes Scribendi” [1830], in Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women, ed. Fetterly, Judith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 49–59Google Scholar.

38. Rosenberg, Charles, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine, ed. Vogel, Morris and Rosenberg, Charles E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 10Google Scholar.

39. See Banta, Martha, “Medical Therapies and the Body Politic,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 8 (1983): 59–128CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Titus, Mary, “‘This Poisonous System’: Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Garfield, Deborah M. and Zafar, Rafia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 199–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. On the notion of the total corruptibility of society engendered by republicanism's organic worldview, see Pocock, J. G. A., “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Political Thought,” in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Athenaeum, 1973), 80–103Google Scholar.

41. Quoted in Wood, Gordon D., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 59 n. 25Google Scholar.

42. Quotations from Wood, , Creation, 36, 416–17Google Scholar.

43. Frederic Henry Hedge to Conyers Francis, February 14, 1843, quoted in Woodall, Guy R., “The Record of a Friendship: The Letters of Conyers Francis to Frederic Henry Hedge in Bangor and Providence, 1835–1850,” in Studies in the American Renaissance: 1991, ed. Myerson, Joel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 4Google Scholar. James Russell Lowell wrote to a friend that he was “fast becoming ultra-democratic, and, when I come to see you … I intend to inoculate you with the (I won't call it by the technical term of ‘virus,’ because that's too hard a word, but with the) principle” (Lowell to George B. Loring, 11 15, 1828, in Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Norton, Charles Eliot [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894], 1: 33Google Scholar). In 1834, editor Hall, James denounced the practice of “inoculating embryo clergymen” with abolitionist ideas (Cincinnati Magazine [05 16, 1834]Google Scholar, quoted in Richards, Leonard L., “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1970], 42Google Scholar).

44. In so arguing, I am dissenting from the interpretation of David C. Miller, according to whom antebellum invocation of disease metaphors implied an “uncertain … realm of human motivation and signification” (see Miller, , “Infection and Imagination: The Atmospheric Analogy and the Problem of Romantic Culture in America,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 13 [1988]: 37–60 [quotation, 45]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

45. See Rosenberg, Charles, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A discussion of financial panics covering the same period found a similar trend toward secular explanation (see Fabian, “Speculations on Distress,” 127–42).

46. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Samuel Ward, December 1, 1840, in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Hilen, Andrew (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 2: 268Google Scholar.

47. Richardson, Merill, “The Religious Sentiments of Thomas Carlyle,” American Biblical Repository 8 (10 1842): 404Google Scholar. Richardson would later tease the Transcendentalists with misapplying the star trope to Carlyle (see “A Plain Discussion with a Transcendentalist,” New Englander 1 [10 1843]: 509Google Scholar).

48. Even in the 17th century, when disease was seen as a divine punishment, its use as a figure for information dissemination reflected human agency. Describing the spread of the Antinomian disease in New England in 1644, Thomas Weld recalled that the heterodox “began to open their packs, and freely vent their wares to any that would be their customers; Multitudes of men and women … having tasted of their Commodities, were eager after them, and were streight infected before they were aware, and some being tainted conveyed the infection to others: and thus that Plague first began amongst us” (see Weld's preface to A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, by Winthrop, John, in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, ed. Hall, David D. [Durham: Duke University Press, 1990], 201–2Google Scholar).

49. This is not to say, however, that use of star or disease tropes indicated divergent aesthetic philosophies on the part of either individual critics or periodicals as a whole. Rufus Griswold, for example, used both, describing Edgar Allan Poe (admittedly in the context of an extremely hostile obituary) as one of America's “most brilliant but erratic stars” while denouncing Cornelius Mathews as being “infected with the disease of building up a national literature” (see Quinn, Arthur Hobson, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 646Google Scholar; and Miller, Perry, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956], 196)Google Scholar. The sole instance I have found in which disease and celestial tropes were mixed — an unidentified review from Philadelphia in which George Sand was described as a “meteor” who communicated “a moral contagion” — was ridiculed by a New York critic as full of “unexampled contortions of rhetoric and sense” (“Parlor Periodicals,” United States Democratic Review 30 [01 1852]: 79, 78Google Scholar).

50. This seems to have been the case even when the critic was expressing a positive attitude toward the work or author in question. Announcing the American publication of Carlyle, 's French Revolution in 1838Google Scholar, one critic predicted that, “every body … for some time to come, will betray symptoms of Carlylomania. But no matter; it is a kind mania which after all betokens a good constitution and rich endowments” (Boston Quarterly Review 1 [01 1838]: 128)Google Scholar. Note that the critic believed the fad for Carlyle would last only “for some time.”

51. “Literary Phenomena,” American Whig Review 4 (1846): 405–6, 406Google Scholar. “Valdemar,” of course, is an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's popular tale of mesmerism, “Facts of M. Valdemar's Case,” which had itself been published in the Review in December 1845.

52. Ibid., 407.

53. Copcutt, Francis, “Byron: Collected from the Various Writings of Thomas Carlyle,” Knickerbocker 21 (03 1843): 199Google Scholar. Meteors, he wrote, “we have to avoid … or be discolored, perhaps burned in the conflagration” (199). By the sun, on the other hand, “we shall … see more clearly which is the higher, firmer ground … and in joy and gratitude behold the path to our Father's mansion” (200). Again, Copcutt was probably inspired to this distinction by the dramatic meteor sighting of earlier that year. Note, however, that for some critics, all fame was “meteoric” and hence transient; thus, a teenaged Hawthorne echoed Ecclesiastes in writing that “earthly pomp is but a dream, /And like a meteor's short-lived gleam” (quoted in Mellow, James R., Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980], 22Google Scholar).

54. Quoted in [Moulton, William U.], The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1855), 60–61Google Scholar. This authorial attribution is suggested by Warren, Joyce W., Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 336 n. 28Google Scholar. The revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney had also been called a “wandering meteor” by Unitarian opponents in 1827 (see Abzug, Robert H., Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform [New York: Oxford University Press, 1980], 45Google Scholar).

55. Medicus, , “Medical Theories,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (10 1829): 444Google Scholar.

56. Lowell, James Russell, “Our Contributors — No. XVII. Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham's Magazine 27 (02 1845): 49Google Scholar.

57. [Lowell, James Russell], “Carlyle's Frederick the Great,” North American Review (04 1866): 419Google Scholar. Lowell might have been drawing his imagery from Cornelius Mathews, who, in the 1839 preface to his Motley Book, defended himself by stating that if the “little light” created by his work could “be blown out, it accomplishes a double end; proving the power of the malicious critic, and furnishing a clearer firmament for such false orbs to twinkle in as he may be pleased to summon into existence.” Here, however, the mere fact that Mathews's light is extinguishable undermines the celestial metaphor he invokes. The critic has become a God: one who can snuff out, as well as create, the stars in the sky (Miller, , The Raven, 82Google Scholar).

58. In reading Lowell in this way, I am following Jerome J. McGann's seminal injunction that scholars of romanticism avoid perpetuating its own ahistorical self-representations (see McGann, , “Romanticism and Its Ideologies,” Studies in Romanticism 21 [1982]: 573–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Klancher, Jon, “English Romanticism and Cultural Production,” in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, H. Aram [New York: Routledge, 1989], 77–88Google Scholar). In essence, this essay is an attempt to historicize the terms of romantic literary (a)historiography.

59. See, for example, Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1978), 72–86Google Scholar. The last few decades have seen a revival of “virus narratives” that depict multiculturalism, and in particular encounters with Africa, in terms of contagion (see Mayer, Ruth, “Africa Is a Virus: Images of Contact and Contagion in American Popular Culture,” paper presented at the Bowery Seminar,Cooper Union,New York,October 30, 1998Google Scholar). Here, as in the 1840s, invocation of disease metaphor functions as a conservative check on the dissemination of unacceptable cultural forms; disease functions as the “ultimate other” (11).

60. Bayley, John, quoted in Ian Hamilton, “An Oxford Union,” New Yorker, 02 19, 1996, 73Google Scholar.

61. This, though, is not a foregone conclusion. See the astute meditations on the institutional bases of fame and fad in Shumway, David, “The Star System in Literary Studies,” PMLA 112 (1997): 85–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

62. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Lavers, Annette (New York: Noonday, 1972), 151Google Scholar.

63. See Geary, Susan, “The Domestic Novel as a Commercial Commodity: Making a Best Seller in the 1850s,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70 (1976): 365–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kelley, Mary, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 3–27Google Scholar.

64. See Davidson, Cathy N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 87–91Google Scholar; Brodhead, Richard, The School of Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Tompkins, Jane, “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation,” in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3–39Google Scholar.

65. See Zboray, Ronald J., “The Transportation Revolution and Antebellum Book Distribution Reconsidered,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 53–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Charvat, William, Literary Publishing in America, 1790–1850 (Philadelphia, 1959), 17–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More generally, see Gilreath, James, “American Book Distribution,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 95 (1985): 501–83Google Scholar.

66. See Pred, Allan R., Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Richard D., Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Gilmore, William J., Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

67. These findings are summarized and discussed in Jackson, Leon, “The Social Construction of Thomas Carlyle's New England Reputation, 1834–36,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 106 (1996): 167–91Google Scholar.

68. Rodden, John, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 418 n. 51Google Scholar.

69. Lakoff and Johnson argue that spatial metaphors are the least metaphoric of figures, because they are grounded in our unavoidable experience of the physical world (see Metaphors We Live By, 56–60).