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.  Nothing is truer than the Wordsworthian creed, on which Carlyle lays such stress, that we need only look on the miracle of every day, to sate ourselves with thought and admiration every day.  But how are our faculties sharpened to do it?  Precisely by apprehending the infinite results of every day.

Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field?  The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground?  No—­but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground.  Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking!

The mind, roused powerfully by this existence, stretches of itself into what the French sage calls the “aromal state.”  From the hope thus gleaned it forms the hypothesis, under whose banner it collects its facts.