During his long residence in Dresden Tieck produced a very large number of short stories (Novellen) which had a decided vogue, though they differ widely from his earlier writings in dealing with real, contemporary life.

It is pleasant to record that the evening of Tieck’s long life was made secure from anxieties by a call to Berlin from Friedrich Wilhelm IV., the “Romantic king.”  His last eleven years were spent there in quiet and peace, disturbed only by having to give dramatic readings before a self-sufficient court circle which was imperfectly equipped for appreciating the merits of Tieck’s performances.

The early Romantic movement found its purest expression in the person and writings of Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under his assumed literary name Novalis (1772-1801).  Both his father, Baron von Hardenberg (chief director of the Saxon salt-works), and his mother belonged to the Moravians, that devoted group of mystical pietists whose sincere consecration to the things of the spirit has achieved a deathless place in the annals of the religious history of the eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement.  His gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident:  he was a reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the reading of poetry.  He was given a most thorough education, and, while completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend.  He also came to know Fichte, and eagerly absorbed his Doctrine of Science.  A little later he came into close relations with Wilhelm Schlegel and Tieck in Jena.  He experienced a seraphic love for a delicate girl of thirteen, whose passing away at the age of fifteen served to transport the youth’s interests almost exclusively to the invisible world:  “Life is a sickness of the spirit, a passionate Doing.”  His chief conversation lay in solitude, in seeking for a mystic inner solution of the secrets of external nature.  He loved to discourse on these unseen realms, and to create an ideal connection between them all.  The testimony of his friend Tieck, who in company with Friedrich Schlegel edited his works in a spirit of almost religious piety, runs:  “The common life environed him like some tale of fiction, and that 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.”