us too far afield to follow up the traces
of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England
transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower in
such a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners," or Lowell's "Footpath," or
Whittier's "Vanishers," or in Thoreau's little parable about the horse,
the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking.
And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says: "I had seen the red
election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings and
fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling
colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and
solitude of the forest." Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to
visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy
persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent
respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of
history, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet
Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full
development). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is
that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of
the blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and
disappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strange
land and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves above
us?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly
over their heads." "This image of Death, and of the river being the sky
in that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind us
of the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"--

"If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea";

or of Emerson's "Two Rivers":

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"?

But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may
dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal of
Speculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto a
sentence from his "Bluethenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake no
bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality." [29]

Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England.
Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the
title, "Hon