Oriental studies, wherein be well earned a high and honorable rank. His stupendous poetical genius somehow never came to flower, much less to fruit, and remained therefore a secret close locked in his bosom. He assures us that he possessed it, and no doubt he knew, for in those days, as you are aware, the inner life knew everything.
Novalis, our second illustration, is a more interesting character. His was a profound and noble nature, but fate forbade him to reach maturity. To his beautiful and baffling fragments the sensitive reader returns ever and anon afresh, perplexed, disappointed, and yet always delighted. Novalis never lived to finish anything. His philosophical fragments are after all, however, the best brief compend you could find of the essence of the romantic philosophy, in all its spiritual depth and in all its waywardness. For Friedrich Schlegel, in his metaphysical capacity, as you have just seen, I cannot feel any serious respect. He was wayward and he was not deep. But Novalis every one who knows him truly must thoroughly love. His childlike straightforwardness, his amiable plasticity, not to say innocent fickleness of character, his real strength of ideals withal, his sensitiveness to truth, even his very incapacity (so characteristic of his school) to do more than turn chance jewels of truth over and over and hold them up to the light — all these things fascinate us. He is not exactly a great thinker, but of his kind he is so charming. Novalis, or Friedrich von Hardenberg, was born in 1772, the second child of a large and very affectionate family. His childhood was sickly, and until he was nine years old, while he was the object of the kindest care, his mind seemed in no wise extraordinary. Then suddenly, after an acute affection, his health bettered, and he appeared to wake, “as if from sleep,” as his biographer says. He was now a quick-witted, studious and imaginative boy, a great inventor
