esolved to do all they could for her, and at last
bethought themselves of placing her in the hands of the much talked of
physician, Justinus Kerner, who lived in the pleasant valley town of
Weinsberg and was said to be an adept in every branch of the healing
art, notably in the mesmerism which alone appeared to benefit her. To
Kerner, therefore, she was sent; and it is not difficult to imagine the
delight with which she exchanged the gloomy mountain forests for the
verdant meadows and fragrant vineyards of Weinsberg.

Kerner, who is better known to the present generation as mystic and poet
than as physician, was justly accounted one of the celebrities of the
day. Eccentric and visionary, he was yet a man of solid learning and an
intense patriot. It was owing to him, as his biographers fondly recall,
that Weinsberg's most glorious monument, the well named Weibertrube, was
not suffered to fall into utter neglect, but was instead restored to
remind all Germans of that distant day, in the long gone twelfth
century, when the women of Weinsberg, securing from the conqueror the
promise that their lives would be spared, and that they might take with
them from the doomed city their most precious belongings, staggered
forth under the burden not of jewels and treasure but of their husbands,
whom they carried in their arms or on their backs. Thus was a massacre
averted, and thus did the name of "Woman's Faithfulness" attach itself
to the castle in the shadow of which Kerner spent his days. But at the
time of which we write neither the castle nor poetry held first place in
his thoughts; instead, he was absorbed in the practice of his
profession. And so, with the ardor of the enthusiast and the sympathy of
the true physician, he welcomed to Weinsberg the sufferer of whom he had
heard much and of whom he was to become both doctor and biographer.[M]

It was in November, 1826, that he first met her. She was then
twenty-five, and thus had been for six years in a state of almost
constant ill health. Her very appearance moved him profoundly. Her
fragile body, he relates in the graphic word picture he drew, enveloped
her spirit but as a gauzy veil. She was extremely small, with Oriental
features and dark-lashed eyes that were at once penetrating and
"prophetic." When she spoke his conviction deepened that he was looking
on one who belonged more to the world of the dead than to the world of
the living; and he speedily became persuaded that s