nd
broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to
him the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet,"
where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal," a pair of
lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too
late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left
to mock their youthful hope.

But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists was
Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the
_Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night," written in
Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices
of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance
"Heinrich von Ofterdingen." The hero was a legendary poet of the time of
the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg.
But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval
life--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and
allegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blue
flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else."
Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a
fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards
him, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a
lovely face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the real
object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich." Boyesen gives a
subtler interpretation. "This blue flower," he says, "is the watchword
and symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless
longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with
longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but
a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship
with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of
happiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romantic
longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . The
blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets
may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief
glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men,
but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills
the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic
rapture." [27] It would lead