He was the _enfant perdu_ of the Romantic School. He might also be called the prodigal son of poetry. Like the young man in the New Testament, he was a spendthrift. He squandered all the many good and witty ideas that occurred to him, all the fertile situations which he invented, upon works destitute of definite plan and form, and consequently destitute of the power to withstand time, which so soon sweeps away everything formless. Before he was forty he had exhausted his intellectual capital, had squandered his substance, and was fain, like the young man of the Bible, "to fill his belly with the husks that the swine did eat"--the husks that were the food of only ignorant and superstitious human beings. In other words, he relapsed into foolish bigotry. In the year 1817 he began to go to confession again, as in the days of his earliest youth, and in the following year withdrew from all intercourse with his fellows, to pass the next six years of his life in devout contemplation by the sick-bed of the nun, Catharina Emmerich, who bore on her body the marks of the wounds of Christ. He regarded the bodily infirmities of this pious, single-minded, but perfectly hysterical girl, as so many wonderful signs of grace, believed in the miraculousness of the supposed imprints of the Saviour's wounds, and with awe-strick'en compassion watched them bleed from time to time. Catharina's words convinced him that she possessed a mysterious, supernatural gift of second-sight, and he carefully noted down every one of her visions and hallucinations. He wrote the story of her life, edited her reflections, and wrote to her dictation _The Life of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary_. After her death, which happened in 1824, practically his only occupation was the preparing for publication of the fourteen volumes of manuscript containing her various utterances. Brentano's life is a remarkable exemplification of the truth of the words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's _Faust_:-- "Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft, Des Menschen aller höchste Kraft, Lass nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken Dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken, So hab' ich dich schon unbedingt."[1] Hallucinations and magic played no small part in his existence, and the man who had begun by sneering at rationalism as dull and barren, fell a prey to ideas far duller and more barren than the emptiest rationalism. He was no more a hypocrite than the good soul, Catharina Emmerich, was an impostor. But the craving for some firm, external support for his weak, wavering Ego, now still farther enfeebled by remorse for the recklessness of his youth, led him to cling with all the fanatical enthusiasm of his soul to the Church and its miracles, just as he had clung in earlier days to poetry with its fairy-tales and magic.