realm which most men
conceive as something far and incomprehensible was the very Home of
his Soul." He was not quite twenty-nine years old at the time of his
peaceful death, which plunged the circle of his Romantic friends into
deepest grief.

The envelope of his spiritual nature was so tenuous that he seemed to
respond to all the subtler influences of the universe; a sensitive
chord attuned to poetic values, he appeared to exercise an almost
mediumistic refraction and revelation of matters which lie only in the
realm of the transcendental--

"Weaving about the commonplace of things
The golden haze of morning's blushing glow."

In reading Novalis, it is hardly possible to discriminate between
discourse and dreaming; his passion was for remote, never-experienced
things--

"Ah, lonely stands, and merged in woe,
Who loves the past with fervent glow!"

His homesickness for the invisible world became an almost sensuous
yearning for the joys of death.

In the first volume of the _Athenaeum_ (1798) a place of honor was
given to his group of apothegms, _Pollen_ (rather an unromantic
translation for "_Bluethenstaub_"); these were largely supplemented by
materials found after his death, and republished as _Fragments_. In
the last volume of the same journal (1800) appeared his _Hymns to
Night_. Practically all of his other published works are posthumous:
his unfinished novel, _Henry of Ofterdingen_; a set of religious
hymns; the beginnings of a "physical novel," _The Novices at Sais_.

Novalis's aphoristic "seed-thoughts" reveal Fichte's transcendental
idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on
life. The external world is but a shadow; the universe is in us;
there, or nowhere, is infinity, with all its systems, past or future;
the world is but a precipitate of human nature.

_The Novices at Sais_, a mystical contemplation of nature reminding us
of the discourses of Jakob Boehme, has some suggestion of the
symbolistic lore of parts of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and proves a
most racking riddle to the uninitiated. The penetration into the
meaning of the Veiled Image of Nature is attempted from the point of
view that all is symbolic: only poetic, intuitive souls may enter in;
the merely physical investigator is but searching through a
charnel-house. Nature, the countenance of Divinity, reveals herself to
the childlike spirit; to such she will, at her own good pleasure,
disclose herself