in the hand-writing. On
this occasion, the evil influences have been evaded; the mood,
the hand, the pen and paper have conspired to let our friend
write truly himself."

'You may perceive, I quote from memory, as the sentences
are anything but Goethean; but I think often of this little
passage. With me, for weeks and months, the daemon works his
will. Nothing succeeds with me. I fall ill, or am otherwise
interrupted. At these times, whether of frost, or sultry
weather, I would gladly neither plant nor reap,--wait for
the better times, which sometimes come, when I forget that
sickness is ever possible; when all interruptions are upborne
like straws on the full stream of my life, and the words that
accompany it are as much in harmony as sedges murmuring near
the bank. Not all, yet not unlike. But it often happens, that
something presents itself, and must be done, in the bad time;
nothing presents itself in the good: so I, like the others,
seem worse and poorer than I am.'

In another letter to an earlier friend, she expatiates a little.

'As to the Daemoniacal, I know not that I can say to you
anything more precise than you find from Goethe. There are
no precise terms for such thoughts. The word _instinctive_
indicates their existence. I intimated it in the little piece
on the Drachenfels. It may be best understood, perhaps, by a
symbol. As the sun shines from the serene heavens, dispelling
noxious exhalations, and calling forth exquisite thoughts
on the surface of earth in the shape of shrub or flower, so
gnome-like works the fire within the hidden caverns and secret
veins of earth, fashioning existences which have a longer
share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in
thought. Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but
this power moves only to seize its prey. It is not necessarily
either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond
demonstrating its existence. When conscious, self-asserting,
it becomes (as power working for its own sake, unwilling to
acknowledge love for its superior, must) the devil. That is
the legend of Lucifer, the star that would not own its
centre. Yet, while it is unconscious, it is not devilish, only
daemoniac. In nature, we trace it in all volcanic workings, in
a boding position of lights, in whispers of the wi