In the first volume of _Green Henry_, Keller informs us that he found the story of poor little Meret among the papers of an orthodox pastor in the beginning of the eighteenth century; but according to Bächtold, in _Keller’s Letters_, she seems to have been an invention of his own. However this may be, the story of little Meret, the witch-child, is the most valuable contribution towards a study of the psychology of the child-woman that we possess in German literature. In this story Keller displayed the secret nature of the child-woman in its rarest perfection and vitality, which is a thing that a man can scarcely understand and which no woman likes to talk about. It is one of those revelations which belong only to him who is born a poet in soul and nerves and every fibre of his being, born an unconscious poet, by which I mean an intuitive seer. In this child, tormented to death, is displayed the primeval trait, the innermost kernel of woman’s nature, and the woman of genius in the bud is made visible. Little Meret possesses the one quality, the only one through which woman is more nearly related to nature than man, it is a carefully concealed quality, seen only by the few, but which for ever shuts out the woman from outward conformity with the man, and which is the key to her most secret, most mysterious witchcraft--her wildness. The best and the worst women are not docile and tameable, they are not capable of being cultivated and civilised like man--such are only women of middling quality--they are ungovernable, irreverent, full of instinct, nothing but feminine instinct. Whence should come the regeneration of humanity, unless it be from the unused sources of nature, the source of woman’s unconscious glory? Whence should proceed the mysterious power of loving, with love’s inexplicable dominion over souls, unless it be from the unfathomable, the incomprehensible nature of woman, with her utter disregard for law and justice and all the rest of the intricate building of commonsense upon which human society is founded? Owing to her physiological structure woman is a creature of instinct, and this instinct is her most precious possession, the heritage which she bequeaths to future generations; it is always the same instinct, whether it reveals itself in an evil race of feminine malefactors such as Strindberg’s women, or in the richly gifted specimens of Keller’s apocalypse of woman: Judith and little Meret. They are not to be forced in either case! They are all children of nature.