“Misero mostro d’infelice amore;
  Misero mostro a cui sol pena e degna
  Dell’ immensa impieta, la vita indegna.”

  “Vivro fra i miei tormenti e fra le cure,
  Mie giuste furie, forsennato errante. 
  Paventero l’ombre solinghe e scure,
  Che l’primo error mi recheranno avante
  E del sol che scopri le mie sventure,
  A schivo ed in orrore avro il sembiante. 
  Temero me medesmo; e da me stesso
  Sempre fuggendo, avro me sempre appresso.”

  LA GERUSALEMME:  LIBERATA, C. XII. 76, 77.

TO R.W.E.

’Dec.12, 1843.—­When Goethe received a letter from Zelter, with a handsome superscription, he said.  “Lay that aside; it is Zelter’s true hand-writing.  Every man has a daemon, who is busy to confuse and limit his life.  No way is the action of this power more clearly shown, than in the hand-writing.  On this occasion, the evil influences have been evaded; the mood, the hand, the pen and paper have conspired to let our friend write truly himself.”

’You may perceive, I quote from memory, as the sentences are anything but Goethean; but I think often of this little passage.  With me, for weeks and months, the daemon works his will.  Nothing succeeds with me.  I fall ill, or am otherwise interrupted.  At these times, whether of frost, or sultry weather, I would gladly neither plant nor reap,—­wait for the better times, which sometimes come, when I forget that sickness is ever possible; when all interruptions are upborne like straws on the full stream of my life, and the words that accompany it are as much in harmony as sedges murmuring near the bank.  Not all, yet not unlike.  But it often happens, that something presents itself, and must be done, in the bad time; nothing presents itself in the good:  so I, like the others, seem worse and poorer than I am.’

In another letter to an earlier friend, she expatiates a little.

’As to the Daemoniacal, I know not that I can say to you anything more precise than you find from Goethe.  There are no precise terms for such thoughts.  The word instinctive indicates their existence.  I intimated it in the little piece on the Drachenfels.  It may be best understood, perhaps, by a symbol.  As the sun shines from the serene heavens, dispelling noxious exhalations, and calling forth exquisite thoughts on the surface of earth in the shape of shrub or flower, so gnome-like works the fire within the hidden caverns and secret veins of earth, fashioning existences which have a longer share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in thought.  Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but this power moves only to seize its prey.  It is not necessarily either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond demonstrating its existence.  When conscious, self-asserting, it becomes (as power working for its own sake,