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! |
