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culed the facts which would have confirmed their own doctrines, crucified Him of whom their own Scriptures testified, and condemned His followers as madmen or criminals.

When the Apostle Paul was brought to trial for proclaiming a truth of which he was himself the witness, he appealed to those who professed to hold this truth.

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"Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. Of the hope and resurrection of the dead am I called in question.' Spiritualists appeal to those "who profess to believe in angels, spirits, and a future state," with all the miraculous facts of Our Lord's history.

"Men and brethren, we are Christians believing, not only because our fathers have declared unto us, but because we have heard with our ears, and seen with our eyes, the works of the Spirit. Of the hope and resurrection of the dead, and of the truth of every spiritual gift promised by Our Lord to his faithful followers, we are this day called in question.'

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The manner in which this appeal has been met by those who profess to examine testimony with fairness, "caring only for the truth," leads naturally enough to a comparison of their principles and their practice in relation to the phenomena of Spiritualism. This comparison leads again to a suspicion that if the new wonders have their counterparts in the old, so, as to their mutual relations, do the three of our time-the Spiritualist, the Sceptic, and the Reviewer-find their counterparts in that ancient three-the Apostle Paul, the old Sadducee, and the Pharisee. S. E. De M.

CAROLINE VON GÜNDErode.

By WILLIAM HOWITT.

THIS young lady, who was of a poetical and highly sensitive nature, had the misfortune to live in Germany at the time when Goethe's Werther had created in the public mind of that country a taste not only for sentimentality, but for a much worse thing suicide! Fräulein von Günderode was, like Göethe himself, of Frankfort-on-the Main. Bettina Brentano, afterwards Bettina von Arnim, was also of Frankfort; and a romantic friendship existed betwixt these gifted but very excitable young ladies. They spent some time together in the Rheingau, and there, at Offenbach, Caroline Günderode opened to Bettina her intention of committing suicide. She had purchased a dagger with a silver handle, and showed this to Bettina; and also told her that a surgeon had showed her exactly where the spot lay in which to

pierce the heart, and that he assured her that it was very easy to destroy yourself. Bettina, in her celebrated book, Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, relates the scene which took place betwixt them on this occasion. Bettina was one of the most romantic and impulsive of young girls. She seized the dagger and threatened Günderode with it in order to drive, by terror, the idea out of her head. She cut her own finger with the dagger to horrify her with the sight of blood; and then, as inspired with fury, pursued her with the dagger into her bedroom, and, as the alarmed Günderode secured herself behind a leathern easy chair, stabbed the chair frantically several times, and then flung the dagger away. Günderode was greatly alarmed; but there were causes, deeper than a mere poetical theory, which she professed to entertain, that it was the best thing to learn much, to comprehend much through the spirit, and then not to overlive the charm of youth. Günderode was attached to Professor Creuzer, of Heidelberg, celebrated for his classical knowledge. This man is described by Bettina as a remarkably ugly fellow, and more, according to her notions, calculated to disgust than to fascinate a woman. She herself expressed undisguisedly to him her disgust of him, and probably this was the cause that Günderode broke off her friendship with Bettina, to Bettina's excessive grief and wonder. Creuzer, moreover, was a married man, but lived unhappily with his wife, and had assured Günderode that he was about to be divorced, and would afterwards marry her.

Having left her with these assurances, he, however, fell seriously ill, and was so affectionately nursed by his wife that, on his recovery, he wrote to Günderode that he could not think any longer of a divorce, and their attachment must take the soberer ground of friendship. The consequence was, that soon after Die Günderode was found near Winckel, in the Rheingau, not far from the celebrated Johannisberg, lying on the edge of the Rhine, in a willow-holt, with a napkin filled with stones tied round her neck, and the silver-hafted dagger plunged in her heart. The river there is extremely deep, and it appears that to make her death certain, if the stab were not instantly fatal, she meant to throw herself into the water. The blow, however, was effectual; and a peasant finding her, to his great horror, lying dead on the brink of the river, drew forth and flung the dagger into the deep stream, and fled to carry the news to Winckel.

The catastrophe created a great and universal sensation in Germany. Göethe, in his Journal of a Tour on the Rhine, describes visiting the spot, but does not seem to have reflected for a moment that the false and morbid sentiment propagated by his

Werther had been the means of this tragedy. Bettina not only narrates the circumstances in her Briefwechsel, but afterwards wrote a work expressly on them, under the title of Die Günderode.

When I formerly heard the Gründerode talked of in Germany, and read these publications, I had no idea that the deep interest connected with this unhappy event arose out of more than its own tragic character; but a recent perusal of her poems and prose essays, under the title of Gedichte und Phantasien von Tian, published in Hamburg and Frankfort, in 1804, shows her to have possessed a mind of high and remarkable power, and explains that the deep and lasting feeling created by her fate, arose out of the knowledge that in her a soul capable of casting great lustre on the literature of her native land, had been thus cut off from its proper career.

There are, indeed, many circumstances connected with Die Günderode which are of peculiar interest to Spiritualists. Günderode was a Spiritualist. She had not only discovered the fact of its reality, and acquired great knowledge of its phenomena, but had indoctrinated Bettina Brentano, in those years of her effervescing sensibilities and vivid imagination, to a degree that made even the Günderode tremble at her own work. Neither of these young ladies lived in a time and amongst people who could be safe guides through the first intricate labyrinths of this philosophy of life. The facility with which Günderode accepted the idea of Creuzer divorcing his wife in order to marry her, will, perhaps, startle our English ideas less now than it would before the erection of our divorce court, and its sad revelations but the ease with which divorces have long been procured, and the indifference with which they have been regarded in Germany, made the acceptance of a lover by Günderode, under such circumstances, nothing remarkable in that country and age. To the national ideas on this subject were, however, then added the morbid condition of sentiment, and the even fashionable notion of suicide, propagated by Göethe. These, in two young and enthusiastic girls, were not favourable elements for Spiritualism to develop itself in. Spiritualism, however, had clearly nothing to do with Gründerode's catastrophe: it arose from the Werther sentimentalism operating on disappointed affection. In Bettina von Arnim's peculiar temperament, one of poetic sensibility of the most delicate and quivering kind, with a daring disregard of conventional ideas and customs, its effects were extraordinary, but happily not permanently injurious.

She describes Gründerode as of a tall and graceful figure, with a style of countenance full of spirit and intellect. "She had brown hair, but blue eyes shaded with long eyelashes. When she laughed it was not loudly, but with a soft bubbling, as it

were, of pleasure and mirth. She did not walk, she glided: but that does not express what I mean. The movement of her tall figure could neither be expressed by the word flowing, nor her form by the terms slender and elegant. Her dress fell in attractive folds, catching an indescribable charm from her figure and action. In manner she was most gentle, friendly, and unassuming."

Günderode was what is called a Stiitsdame, or Canoness. That is, she lived at this time in a Convent, but without taking the veil. On ceremonial occasions she wore the dress of the Order, and, says Bettina, when people saw her sitting silently in this costume on such occasions, with her fine, soulful, illuminated face, they sometimes thought that she looked like a spirit about to take its flight. Both Günderode and Bettina were Catholics, and this may account for their so readily accepting the baptism of spiritual truth. "She would teach me philosophy," says Bettina, then a girl, according to her own statement, of thirteen. She taught her that the common notions of imagination were false because they were superficial. That through and beyond the imagination there lay the adytum of spirit-life. Through and beyond this much-talked-of and little understood power, lay the actual highway to the inner and only real world of being. This great mystery she taught had been concealed and typified in the mysteries of all the ancient nations-Greek, Egyptian, and Indian. It was a truth too profound for the commonplace minds of every age, but it was the eternal truth underlying all true philosophy, and proclaimed only in full light by the Hebrew theology. Yet, dost thou not understand how deep these entrances into the mines of the spirit lead! But the time will come when it will be most important for thee; for men go often along desolate paths. The more they possess the power to press forward on them, the more awful becomes their loneliness; the more boundless the desert. If thou wert but aware, however, how deeply thou hast here descended into the wells of thought, and hast already caught glimpses far beneath, of a new morning redness, and that thou shalt re-ascend with joy, and speak of this the deeper world, then shall it be thy great comfort, for the world and thee can never hang together in unity. Thou wilt find no other way of escape from it, but through this fountain in the magic garden of thy phantasy. But it is no phantasy; it is the truth which mirrors itself in phantasy. Genius avails itself of phantasy, in order, under its form, to communicate or insinuate what man is not otherwise capable of receiving. No, thou wilt find no other way to the enjoyment of thy life but that which the children have known from age to age-when they love to talk of deep wells, passing

The Spiritual Magazine, February 1, 1866.]

through which men find flowery gardens, marvellous fruits, crystal palaces, whence peal ravishing music, and where the sun with his rays builds bridges, over which, with firm footing, men can march into the grand centrum. Ah! how true it is, that the souls of children behold the face of God and speak the grandest truths in the hours of their mere pastime, whilst great and learned men labour and labour in the world of mere abstractions, and think they have built up a philosophy when they have merely diffused a deeper darkness.'

The effect upon the sensitive Bettina was, that she found herself in a new world, which made the outer look a mere dreamland, and began to biologize herself by gazing on a vase of flowers placed behind a transparent curtain, when the outer scenes around her passed away. She describes the effect of the colours of the bouquet of flowers upon her as a ray of sunshine fell upon it through a crack in the shutters, as she sat in the darkened room. The flowers were spiritualized. Her keen inner eye, she says, was opened, and the colours, odours, forms of the flowers, assumed a new life; an overpowering beauty. This beauty she felt to be the Divine Spirit, diffused through the bosom of nature, a beauty greater than man: higher than all physical beauty. These colours, odours, forms, and the marvellous light which played about them, gave her dreams which were realities. "If I were to say all I saw, it would be regarded as madness and folly. Yet why should I suppress it? I speak it before God," she says. "I had an inner world-a secret capacity. I saw great appearances when my eyes were closed. I saw the heavenly bodies. They circulated before me in immeasurable vastness, so that I could not perceive their limits, yet I had a conception of their rotundity. The host of stars passed by me on a dark ground." She saw stars as pure spiritual figures dancing, which, she says, she comprehended as a spirit. There stood ranges of lofty columns, and other figures behind, while the stars wheeled far away and then descended into a sea of colour. She saw flowers of gorgeous shapes and hues, and gigantic growth, and heard mysterious music, which, while it transported her, strengthened her heart inconceivably.

Another singular experience seized her: As she rambled in the garden by moonlight she felt herself lifted from the ground. With a light spring she floated in the air, and glided forward two or three feet above the earth, but soon alighted again. She was enraptured with this discovery. She floated down the flights of steps; she raised herself to the boughs of the trees, and passed amongst them. "Thus," she says, "I danced and floated about in the moonlight garden to my inexpressible delight." But it was only thus by night. The next morning she was quite cer

N. S.-I.

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