ws of admiration, as plenteous
hail-storms of jeers and scorns, I never saw mentioned till some year or
two since, in any English publication. Then a playful, but not sarcastic
account of it, in the Dublin Magazine, so far excited my curiosity that
I procured the book intending to read it so soon as I should have some
leisure days, such as this journey has afforded.

Dr. Kerner, its author, is a man of distinction in his native land, both
as a physician and a thinker, though always on the side of reverence,
marvel, and mysticism. He was known to me only through two or three
little poems of his in Catholic legends, which I much admired for the
fine sense they showed of the beauty of symbols.

He here gives a biography, mental and physical, of one of the most
remarkable cases of high nervous excitement that the age, so interested
in such, yet affords, with all its phenomena of clairvoyance and
susceptibility of magnetic influences. I insert some account of this
biography at the request of many who have been interested by slight
references to it. The book, a thick and heavy volume, written with true
German patience, some would say clumsiness, has not, probably, and may
not be translated into other languages. As to my own mental position on
these subjects it may be briefly expressed by a dialogue between several
persons who honor me with a portion of friendly confidence and of
criticism, and myself expressed as _Free Hope_. The others may be styled
_Old Church, Good Sense_, and _Self-Poise_.

_Good Sense_. I wonder you can take any interest in such observations or
experiments. Don't you see how almost impossible it is to make them with
any exactness, how entirely impossible to know anything about them
unless made by yourself, when the least leaven of credulity, excited
fancy, to say nothing of willing or careless imposture, spoils the
whole loaf. Beside, allowing the possibility of some clear glimpses into
a higher state of being, what do we want of it now? All around us lies
what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for
this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves
to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural, before
we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these
things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the
wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

_Free Hope_. And for me also. No