She makes a distinction between spirit as the pure intelligence; soul, the ideal of this individual man; and nerve-spirit, the dynamic of his temporal existence.

Of this feeling of double identity, an invalid, now wasting under nervous disease, often speaks to me.  He has it when he first awakes from sleep.  Blake, the painter, whose life was almost as much a series of trances as that of our Seherin, in his designs of the Resurrection, represents spirits as rising from, or hovering over, their bodies in the same way.

Often she seemed quite freed from her body, and to have no more sense of its weight.

As to artificial culture, or dressing, (dressur,) Frau H. had nothing of it.  She had learned no foreign tongue, neither history, nor geography, nor natural philosophy, nor any other of those branches now imparted to those of her sex in their schools.  The Bible and hymn-book were, especially in the long years of her sickness, her only reading:  her moral character was throughout blameless; she was pious without fanaticism.  Even her long suffering, and the peculiar manner of it, she recognized as the grace of God; as she expresses in the following verses: 

      Great God! how great is thy goodness,
      To me thou hast given faith and love,
    Holding me firm in the distress of my sufferings.

      In the darkness of my sorrow,
      I was so far led away,
    As to beg for peace in speedy death.

      But then came to me the mighty strong faith;
      Hope came; and came eternal love;
    They shut my earthly eyelids. 
      When, O bliss!

      Dead lies my bodily frame,
      But in the inmost mind a light burns up,
    Such as none knows in the waking life. 
      Is it a light? no! but a sun of grace!

Often in the sense of her sufferings, while in the magnetic trance, she made prayers in verse, of which this is one: 

        Father, hear me! 
        Hear my prayer and supplication. 
          Father, I implore thee,
        Let not thy child perish! 
          Look on my anguish, my tears.

      Shed hope into my heart, and still its longing,
      Father, on thee I call; have pity! 
    Take something from me, the sick one, the poor one.

        Father, I leave thee not,
        Though sickness and pain consume me. 
          If I the spring’s light,
        See only through the mist of tears,
          Father, I leave thee not.

These verses lose their merit of a touching simplicity in an unrhymed translation; but they will serve to show the habitual temper of her mind.

“As I was a maker of verses,” continues Dr. Kerner, “it was easy to say, Frau H. derived this talent from my magnetic influence; but she made these little verses before she came under my care.”  Not without deep significance was Apollo distinguished as being at once the God of poesy, of prophecy, and the medical art.  Sleep-waking develops the powers of seeing, healing, and poesy.  How nobly the ancients understood the inner life; how fully is it indicated in their mysteries?