On the other hand, her
peculiar tendency displayed itself in her dreams. If anything affected
her painfully, if her mind was excited by reproof, she had instructive
warning, or prophetic dreams.
While yet quite young, her parents let her go, for the advantages of
instruction, to her grandfather, Johann Schmidgall, in Loewenstein.
Here were discovered in her the sensibility to magnetic and ghostly
influences, which, the good Kerner assures us, her grandparents deeply
lamented, and did all in their power to repress. But, as it appears that
her grandfather, also, had seen a ghost, and there were evidently
legends in existence about the rooms in which the little Frederika saw
ghosts, and spots where the presence of human bones caused her sudden
shivering, we may be allowed to doubt whether indirect influence was not
more powerful than direct repression upon these subjects.
There is the true German impartiality with regard to the scene of
appearance for these imposing visiters; sometimes it is "a room in the
Castle of Loewenstein, long disused," a la Radcliffe, sometimes "a
deserted kitchen."
This "solemn, unhappy gift," brought no disturbance to the childish life
of the maiden, she enjoyed life with more vivacity than most of her
companions. The only trouble she had was the extreme irritability of the
optic nerve, which, though without inflammation of the eyes, sometimes
confined her to a solitary chamber. "This," says Dr. K. "was probably a
sign of the development of the spiritual in the fleshly eye.
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