There is the ring of truth in this description, given by her father, of the young girl's flight. The Count, who knows that he is in no way to blame, tries every method of alienating her. Coming upon her in his stable one night, he thrusts her aside with his foot, and more than once he threatens her with his dog-whip. He allows her to sacrifice herself for his bride, who orders her to rush into a burning house to save his miniature, and when she has brought it, sends her back again for the case. With joy and deep humility she does and bears all. The more refined, but weaker, representation of an overpowering, unrequited passion given us by Henrik Hertz in The _House of Svend Dyring_ is modelled upon Kleist's Käthchen. Side by side with much that is ridiculous and repulsive, _Käthchen von Heilbronn_ contains much that is really grand. It is plain enough that this passion, which comes on as suddenly as a fit of apoplexy--which, moreover, as a fixed idea, destroys every other idea, and, itself a miracle, performs miracles with the aid of an angel--oversteps the bounds of the natural and the healthy. Yet there is something fine in it. It gave intense satisfaction to Kleist, who had such a rooted aversion for mere phrases, to represent a loving woman, in whom everything was truth and reality which in other women is mere words. It was thus that he himself had desired to be loved by his Wilhelmine; and at a later period he had demanded such excessive devotion from a young girl whose acquaintance he had made at the Körners' house in Dresden, and who had become attached to him, that all relations between them were broken off. Now he had taken refuge with his ideal in poetry. There is something satisfying and pleasing in the realisation of the well-known phrases: To see and love was one and the same thing--to follow the beloved to the ends of the earth--to be more devoted to him than his dog--to go through fire and water for him. But yet all this properly belongs to the domain of pathology; these are morbid manifestations. Then, too, we have the Romantic reason of it all. Käthchen's violent agitation when she sees the Count is explained by the fact of his having previously appeared to her in a dream. At the moment when she sees him in this dream, the Count is in reality lying dangerously ill with typhus fever. Stretched like a corpse on his bed, he himself has the feeling that he is entering Käthchen's room. And when he hears of the strange coincidence, he cannot help exclaiming anxiously-- "Help me, ye gods! Now am I double! A spirit I, who wander in the night." Here we have the favourite idea of Romanticism, "Doppelgängerei," in close connection with somnambulism.