As a prose writer, Brentano began, with his _Godwi_, in the style of _Lucinde_. The first part of the book assumes that true morality consists in allowing the sensual instincts free play, and immorality in repressing or ignoring them. With bacchantic wildness the heroine preaches the gospel of free love, and denounces marriage and every species of compulsory virtue. The second part, in genuine Romantic fashion, satirises the first part and the characters delineated in it. Godwi, the hero of the first volume, retires into the background, and the author himself, under the pseudonym Maria, takes his place. We learn that it was simply with the view of obtaining the hand of the daughter of one of the personages in the first part of the book, that the author managed to gain possession of the correspondence of which that first part consists. He had hoped by publishing it to attain this end. But, as the first volume is not approved of, he takes it to Godwi, the principal character, and begs him to tell what other love adventures he has had. The astounded Godwi reads his own story. Book in hand, he conducts the author round his garden, and says, pointing to a pond: "This is the pond into which I fall on page 266 of the first volume." Thus in _Godwi_ we have Romantic sensual licence in combination with Romantic irony and selfduplication. The revulsion from revolutionary ardour and passion was even more complete in Brentano's case than in Fr. Schlegel's; it became positive renunciation of reason. And his conversion, like Zacharias Werner's, was of the species accompanied by a tearful conviction of sin. In his _Sketch of the Life of Anna Catharina Emmerich_ he tells, without giving a thought to any possible physiological explanation of the fact, that her longing for the Holy Sacrament was so great, that often at night, feeling herself irresistibly drawn to it, she left her cell, and was found in the morning kneeling with outstretched arms outside the locked church door. It never occurred to him that her condition might be a morbid one, not even when she told him all the particulars of the appearance of the stigmata on her body as if the whole thing had happened to another nun of the neighbourhood.