nvisible region we are
impelled at a very early age by imagination and feeling, and the
teacher, who would keep youthful impatience aloof from it, is only
obliged to have recourse to a different lie, which perhaps, in its
false philosophy, is as bad as that of superstition. So likewise it
appears to me injudicious to avoid cultivating the imagination of
children, even in that singular power, which seeks horror, and devises
blind and wild terrors. This impulse is in us, it stirs itself early;
and if one aims at keeping it under, if one strives to destroy it,
which is impossible, it grows on darkling and deepening, and gains in
strength, what it loses in shape. I have known women, who in an
over-enlightened education had been kept even from the most innocent
fairy tale, and who, in their riper years, could not summon courage to
go even through the next room of an evening, so tyrannized were they by
a nameless, absolutely childish panic, so that they impotently trembled
at every sound and every shadow. If, on the contrary, that element in
the imagination of children, which delights in the prodigious and
fearful, is reduced to shape, if it is softened in legends and stories,
then this world of shadows blends even with humour and drollery, and
itself, the most intricate labyrinth of our minds, may become a magic
mirror of truth. By means of this phantasmagoria, we may catch glimpses
of far distant and yet friendly spirits, which but very seldom pass
across us in visible approximation."

"That you are such a friend to superstition," answered the Baroness,
"is what I now learn for the first time."

Dorothea seemed not to lose a word of this singular conversation; she
looked at Kunigunde, whom this description of an irrational alarm, to
which she was often subject even in the day time, literally fitted; the
other sisters too were at times childish enough, and were afraid of
every walk in the evening. Kunigunde was sensitive; she thought the
stranger was acquainted with her weakness, and meant only to describe
her. The mother could hardly conceal her embarrassment.

"I cannot always approach society," proceeded Brandenstein, "with the
naked truth, for this is what it does not require or expect from me. I
may not throw into it the virtues of solitude, if I would not destroy
the charm by which it is so attractive to the man of cultivated mind.
One finds every where bad society, which I certainly do not mean to
praise; but when