In reading Novalis, it is hardly possible to discriminate between discourse and dreaming; his passion was for remote, never-experienced things—­

  “Ah, lonely stands, and merged in woe,
  Who loves the past with fervent glow!”

His homesickness for the invisible world became an almost sensuous yearning for the joys of death.

In the first volume of the Athenaeum (1798) a place of honor was given to his group of apothegms, Pollen (rather an unromantic translation for “Bluethenstaub"); these were largely supplemented by materials found after his death, and republished as Fragments.  In the last volume of the same journal (1800) appeared his Hymns to Night.  Practically all of his other published works are posthumous:  his unfinished novel, Henry of Ofterdingen; a set of religious hymns; the beginnings of a “physical novel,” The Novices at Sais.

Novalis’s aphoristic “seed-thoughts” reveal Fichte’s transcendental idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on life.  The external world is but a shadow; the universe is in us; there, or nowhere, is infinity, with all its systems, past or future; the world is but a precipitate of human nature.

The Novices at Sais, a mystical contemplation of nature reminding us of the discourses of Jakob Boehme, has some suggestion of the symbolistic lore of parts of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and proves a most racking riddle to the uninitiated.  The penetration into the meaning of the Veiled Image of Nature is attempted from the point of view that all is symbolic:  only poetic, intuitive souls may enter in; the merely physical investigator is but searching through a charnel-house.  Nature, the countenance of Divinity, reveals herself to the childlike spirit; to such she will, at her own good pleasure, disclose herself spontaneously, though gradually.  This seems to be the inner meaning of the episodic tale, Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom.  The rhythmic prose Hymns to Night exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced.  Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above life.  In his Spiritual Poems we feel a simple, passionate intensity of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the heavy-laden; in their ardent assurance of love, peace, and rest, they are surely to be reckoned among the most intimate documents in the whole archives of the “varieties of religious experience.”