is idea, the crown of nature, the platform from which spirit
takes-wing.

Yet, as gradation is the beautiful secret of nature, and the fashioning
spirit, which loves to develop and transcend, loves no less to moderate,
to modulate, and harmonize, it did not mean by thus drawing man onward
to the next state of existence, to destroy his fitness for this. It did
not mean to destroy his sympathies with the mineral, vegetable, and
animal realms, of whose components he is in great part composed; which
were the preface to his being, of whom he is to take count, whom he
should govern as a reasoning head of a perfectly arranged body. He was
meant to be the historian, the philosopher, the poet, the king of this
world, no less than the prophet of the next.

These functions should be in equipoise, and when they are not, when we
see excess either on the natural (so called as distinguished from the
spiritual,) or the spiritual side, we feel that the law is transgressed.
And, if it be the greatest sorrow to see brain merged in body, to see a
man more hands or feet than head, so that we feel he might, with
propriety, be on all fours again, or even crawl like the serpent; it is
also sad to see the brain, too much excited on some one side, which we
call madness, or even unduly and prematurely, so as to destroy in its
bloom, the common human existence of the person, as in the case before
us, and others of the poetical and prophetical existence.

We would rather minds should foresee less and see more surely, that
death should ensue by gentler gradation, and the brain be the governor
and interpreter, rather than the destroyer, of the animal life. But, in
cases like this, where the animal life is prematurely broken up, and the
brain prematurely exercised, we may as well learn what we can from it,
and believe that the glimpses thus caught, if not as precious as the
full view, are bright with the same light, and open to the same scene.

There is a family character about all the German ghosts. We find the
same features in these stories as in those related by Jung Stilling and
others. They bear the same character as the pictures by the old masters,
of a deep and simple piety. She stands before as, this piety, in a full,
high-necked robe, a simple, hausfrauish cap, a clear, straightforward
blue eye. These are no terrible, gloomy ghosts with Spanish mantle or
Italian dagger. We feel quite at home with them, and sure of their good
faith.

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