JOHN HERMANN OBEREIT.
This writer, as much mystic as alchemist, was born at Arbon at Switzerland in 1725, and died in 1798. He inherited from his father a taste for transcendental chemistry, and the opinion that metals could be developed to their full perfection, but that the chief instrument was the grace of God, working in the soul of the alchemist. He laboured unceasingly at the physical processes, hoping thereby to restore the fallen fortunes of his family, but his laboratory was closed by the authorities as endangering the public safety. He contrived to make evident the harmless nature of his employment, and was received into the house of a brother of the physiognomist Lavater. He celebrated, he informs us, a mystical marriage with a seraphic and illuminated shepherdess named Theantis, the ceremony taking place in a castle on the extreme summit of a cloud-encompassed mountain. His bride after thirty-six days of transcendental union, which was neither platonic nor epicurean, but of a perfectly indescribable character, departed this life, and the bereaved husband, during the whole night of her decease, bewailed her in a mystical canticle. La Connexion Originaire des Esprits et des Corps, d’apres les principes de Newton, Augsbourg, 1776, and Les Promenades de Gamaliel, juif Philosophe, were bequeathed by Obereit to a neglectful posterity.