reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had
never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been
given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows,
the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in
the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only
looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures,
had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose
something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be
represented.

Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the
mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water,
rays of light, cloud forms:

They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record
that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special
colour to his spiritual life.[21]

The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always
attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens,
and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a
mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim
of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.

From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings
into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in
his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena
and elementary human feeling. _Blond Egbert_ was the earliest example
of this:

Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without
rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through
breaks in the driving clouds.[22]

In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague
longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which
seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among
the mountains.

_The Runenberg_ gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird
fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over
men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold.

The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses,
are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with
descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23]

The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him
everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into
vague longings for a vague distant goal, which