tain that she could fly, but in the daytime she seemed to forget it. Bettina did not understand this great law of the nightside of nature, but she boldly asserted the facts which resulted from it. She possessed the faculty of seeing spirits. Günderode's deceased sister appeared to her as she lay in bed. To convince herself of being awake, she rose up in bed and gazed at the wellknown figure. The sister took up, apparently, the well-known dagger, lifted it aloft, then laid it noiselessly down, nodding to her as if to make the act significant. Then she advanced to the lamp, which was burning; lifted it aloft in the same manner; then blew it out, leaving Bettina in darkness and terror. She was convinced that Günderode had killed herself, and she urged her brother and Mr. Fritz Schlosser to hasten to Winckel. She went with them. On the way, at an inn where they passed the night, between Frankfort and Winckel, she had three dreams successively, confirming the impression that Günderode was lying dead in her blood: and every time that she awoke, she ran to her brother's chamber, and told him what she had dreamed, and her certainty that they would find Günderode dead. was too true! It There are curious relations by Bettina of her frequently climbing some decayed and dangerous ladders to the top of the old castle of Marburg, which she did not dare to attempt by day; and of sitting on the top of the tower walls, with her legs hanging down outside, and of running to and fro on this lofty and dizzy wall, without fear and with perfect safety. No doubt she was in a somnambulic state at the time, for it was at night that she rose from her bed, flung on a cloak, and in frost and snow made these perilous ascents, wondering at the world of stars above her head. Bettina married Achim von Arnim, a gentleman of fortune, as well as a poet and literary man. In conjunction with her brother, Clemens Brentano, her husband did for Germany, to a certain extent, what Bishop Percy did for England.. These attached and gifted friends collected the fine old romantic ballads which where floating in the popular memory, and published them under the title of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Von Arnim was also the author of many original and popular works of imagination. In such auspicious circumstances, Bettina electrified Germany by the boldness and passionate intensity of her productions. That flood of impulsive enthusiasm which filled her whole being, she had already poured out on the great poet Göethe, with all the ardour of a romantic girl in her teens, the poet being about sixty. This adoration was evidently very flattering to the elderly bard, and he treated her with great tenderness; hoarded up her letters, and said to her once, showing the drawer where he kept them, "These I read every day." The publication of this correspondence by her afterwards, with all its fervid gush of life and love, its dashing intrepidity of thought and expression, its näivete amounting to super-näivetè, excited an indescribable sensation throughout Germany. To some she was mad; to some she was inspired. Grave men, and Goethe himself, turned the glowing diction of some of her letters into poems; grave philosophers lamented that she thus "laid bare the subjectivity of her inner being." They talked much of her subjective impressions. Subjectivity and objectivity-those juggler's balls of German metaphysicians, contrived to prevent the human understanding perceiving the truth! As if the objective were the real, the subjective the imaginary. Had they only dared to call them the outward and the inward, the truth might have been approached. But Bettina had discovered that which gave a new life to her writings, and, amid all her apparent extravagancies and eccentricities, that is the spell which draws the imagination after them, and makes the uninitiated reader wonder, and kindle as he wonders. Let us now, however, turn to the little volume of Günderode's youthful effusions. In them we shall find evidences, not so glittering and piquant as those in Bettina, yet genuine evidences of what is now called Spiritualism. These are especially conspicuous in a little dialogue, called Die Manen, ein Fragment, and what she calls, Immortalita, ein Dramolet. The first is a dialogue betwixt a scholar and his master. The scholar, impressed with the greatness of past heroes and men of genius, wishes that he could come into actual communication with their souls. The master tells him, to his astonishment, that this is possible, for that we stand in a perpetual union with the minds of those gone into the other world, with whom we have not ceased to harmonize. We may give the remainder of the dialogue as it stands. "MASTER: Thus all harmonious things exist in a certain connection, whether visible or invisible, and as certainly as we stand in rapport with that part of the spirit-world which is in harmony with us. A similar or kindred thought in different heads, even when these heads are not conscious of it, or these souls are not known to each other, is, in a spiritual sense, a union. The death of a person who stands in such a relation to us, does not destroy this relation. Death is a chemical process, a separation of forces, but no destroyer; it rends not the bond betwixt us and kindred souls: the progress of the one, and the retrogression of the other only, can break up this communion; as a man who has progressed in everything that is excellent no longer harmonizes with a youthful friend who has remained rude and ignorant. You can easily apply what I have said, both generally and particularly. [The Spiritual Magazine, February 1, 1866. "SCHOLAR: Perfectly. You say that harmony of forces is union; death destroys not this union because he only separates, does not destroy. "MASTER: I add, also, this; that the cessation of those conditions in which the harmony properly consisted, for instance, a total change of views and opinions, must necessarily destroy this union. "SCHOLAR: That I have not lost sight of. "MASTER: Good. Then a union with the dead, who have not ceased to harmonize with us, may still continue? "SCHOLAR: I admit it. "MASTER: It remains, therefore, only to become conscious of this union. Simply spiritual forces cannot become visible to our outward senses; they do not operate through our physical organs upon us, but through that organ by means of which only a union or rapport is possible, through the inner sense on which they operate immediately. This inner sense, the deepest and finest organ of the soul, is, in the great majority of mankind, totally undeveloped; merely the germ is existing in them. The bustle of the world; the pursuit of business; the habit of dwelling and looking only on the surface of things, prevents us arriving at any spiritual growth-any clear spiritual consciousness. Thus this great psychical fact of our nature remains, for the most part, unacknowledged; and the revelation of it, in different times and persons, has always had so many doubters and sneerers, that to this present time there is no reception or operation of it but in men of rarest occurrence, or the most especial individuality. "I am, indeed, far from putting faith in the many ridiculous stories of apparitions; but I am quite persuaded that the inner sense may be cultivated to a degree in which the apparition of the spiritual being may be able to make itself palpable to the outward eye, or, as more usually the case, the outward apparition may present itself to the spiritual eye. I need not, therefore, talk of the miraculous, or of trickery, or of illusion of the senses, in order to explain this phenomenon. Yet I am well aware that, in the language of the world, people term this development of the inner sense-overstrained imagination. He in whom this inner sense, this eye of the Spirit has opened, sees those things invisible to others, which are in union with him. From this inner sense religions have proceeded, and so, many of the apocalypses of the olden and of recent times. Out of this capacity of the inner sense, objects which are invisible to other men, whose spiritual eyes are still closed, become palpable, and prophecy, which is no other than this gift of seeing the connection of the present and the past with the future-the necessary cohesion of cause and effect-arises. Prophecy is the sense or perceptive faculty for the future. Man cannot learn the art of prophecying; the faculty for it is mysterious-it unfolds itself in a mysterious manner; it bursts forth frequently, like the lightning's flash, and again buries itself in deeper night. You cannot call forth spirits by conjurations, but they can reveal themselves to the spirit; the receptive can receive them: they can show themselves to the inner sense. "The teacher was silent, and his listener departed; but many thoughts were busy in his mind, and his whole soul yearned to make himself master of the conditions necessary to the possession of so noble a power." In another little paper, called an apocalyptic fragment, the Günderode imagines herself passed into the spirit-world:-"I seemed no longer myself, and yet more than myself. I could no longer find my accustomed limits. My consciousness had outgrown itself; it was greater, different, and yet I felt myself in it. Ι was released from the narrow bonds of my being, and was no longer an isolated drop in the ocean; I now belonged to everything and everything to me. I thought and felt, swam in the billows of the sea, glittered in the sun, circled with the stars, felt myself in all, and enjoyed all in myself. "Therefore, he who has ears to hear, let him hear! It is not two, nor three, nor a thousand: it is one and all. It is not body and soul separated, so that one belongs to time and the other to eternity; it is One; belongs to itself and eternity at once; visible and invisible; fixed in movement, an illimitable life." In the little dramatic sketch of Immortalita, Immortality is represented as inclosed in a circle formed of a vast serpent which holds its tail fast in its mouth. She is in a gloomy region thus environed, conscious of a great nature, but unaware of her real sovereignty. Hecate, whom she invokes to explain the mystery of her condition, tells her that she is the queen of all things, though she does not know it, and that the hour is coming for her enfranchisement. Soon a beautiful youth named Erodion, the son of Love and Beauty, springs on shore near her from Charon's boat, in which he has passed over. He recognizes Immortality as the being after whom he has always yearned, and Hecate again appearing, tells Erodion to step into the serpent-formed circle, when instantly the serpent unrolls itself and disappears, and Immortality finds herself, freed from all bonds, a denizen of the universe. This little drama, under a classic form, describes the condition of man at the period of the approach of Christianity. Human wisdon, then as now, had clouded the soul, and in its shape of serpent, or serpentine cunning, had cooped up the knowledge of our immortality within the narrow circle of its own limited nature. The human mind, restless and unsatisfied, haunted by its immortal instincts, knows not how to comprehend its situation, much less how to escape from its durance. But man enlightened by Christianity, in the shape of Erodion, the son of divine Love and Beauty, arrives, the serpent circle of human wisdom is dissolved and the soul re-asserts its native claims. Life and immortality are in reality brought to light. Erodion, or Christianity, embodied in man, throws down the rocks which human erudition had piled up betwixt this life and the next. Immortality exclaims "Triumph! the rocks are thrown down! From this time and for ever it is given to the thoughts of love, the dreams of desire, the inspirations of the poet, to descend out of the land of the living to the realm of shadows, and to return again." "HECATE: Hail! threefold immortal life will ensoul this pale realm of shadows, now thy kingdom is established." "IMMORTALITY: Come, Erodion, ascend with me into the eternal light, and all love and every excellence shall flourish in my kingdom. And thou, Charon, smooth thy brow, and become the friendly conductor of those who shall enter my dominions." "ERODION: Blessed am I, that I held fast in heart like a festal fire, its sacred presentiment! Blessed, that I had the courage to die the death of mortals, and live the life of the immortals, offering up the visible to the invisible !" These immature fruits of a great soul show us what might have been the splendid results of a natural term of its existence here. The free and bold imagination, the undaunted action of an understanding which cut, with an independent edge, through all the weak sophistries and metaphysics of the time, and seized on the underlying truth, and openly proclaimed it, give us assurance that in its more advanced period she would have left some noble monument of the highest science of life, and have placed her name on the same substantial platform as Stilling, Kerner, Schubert, Eschenmayer, Meyer, Eckartshausen, and Hornung. The shock of circumstances on a too-sensitive nature deprived this world of the full blossom of those genial and intrepid talents and carried them to some more auspicious sphere. Let us, however, gather up lovingly the few fallen garlands of a hapless child of the morning, and hang them up on a fair column in our spiritual Walhalla. Some day, in some far inner land we shall recognize by them the traces of that onward-marching maiden, and say, "Here has passed that same Günderode," still following the footsteps and hymning the anthems of IMMORTALITA! |