it seems to her, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absent seven years.  Or there is “The Runenberg,” where a youth wandering in the mountains, receives from a sorceress, through the casement of a ruined castle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years afterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends to search for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old and broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to him the most precious stones.  And there is the story of “The Goblet,” where the theme is like that of Hawthorne’s “Shaker Bridal,” a pair of lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left to mock their youthful hope.

But the mystic, par excellence, among the German romanticists was Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the Foreign Review for 1829.  Novalis’ “Hymns to the Night,” written in Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.”  The hero was a legendary poet of the time of the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg.  But in Novalis’ romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval life—­everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and allegory.  The story opens with the words:  “I long to see the blue flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else.”  Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards him, the petals showing “like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a lovely face.”  This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, “the real object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich.”  Boyesen gives a subtler interpretation.  “This blue flower,” he says, “is the watchword and symbol of the school.  It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless longings of a poet’s soul.  Romantic poetry invariably deals with longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of happiness which the world has to offer.  The object of the romantic longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . .  The blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it.  If for a moment its perfume fills the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic rapture.” [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New