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Updated: June 27, 2025
He published, among other things, a Life of Schiller, a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and two volumes of translations from the German romancers Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouqué and contributed to the Edinburgh and Foreign Review articles on Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the Nibelungen Lied, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms.
It is observed by Novalis, in his 'Thoughts on Morals, that the ideal of moral perfection has no more dangerous rival to contend with than the ideal of the highest strength and the most energetic life, the maximum of the barbarian which needs only a due admixture of pride, ambition, and selfishness, to be a perfect ideal of the devil.
Nor does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy. Schiller is his king of singers, although he does not much admire his "Philosophical Letters," or his "Aesthetic Letters."
One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the kindnesses she had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word he now spoke was the greatest. "It is certain," says Novalis, "my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it." It is a boundless favor. He never forgot this good Kadijah.
In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen Lied the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature than ourselves."
A palpitant imagination outranks "cold intelligence;" sensation, divorced from all its bearings or functions, is its own excuse for being. Of responsibility, hardly a misty trace; realities are playthings and to be treated allegorically. The step was not a long one to the thesis that "disorder and confusion are the pledge of true efficiency" such being one of the "seed-thoughts" of Novalis.
So shall it be with us when we wake from this dream of life into the truer life beyond, and find all our present notions of being, thrown back as into a dim, vapoury region of dreamland, where yet we thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into the present. This must be what Novalis means when he says: "Our life is not a dream; but it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one."
From here it was that he sent forth those magnificent articles on Heyne, Goethe, Novalis, Voltaire, Burns, and Johnson, which, published in the Edinburgh and other Reviews, attracted the attention of the reading world, and excited boundless admiration among students.
What real weakness is there in the Atheist's seeking for sympathy and concurrence? It is hard for any man to stand alone; certainly it was not in Lord Bacon's line to do so; and why should not the Atheist be "glad to be strengthened by the opinion of others"! Novalis said that his opinion gained infinitely when it was shared by another.
The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic; the romantic is completely leveled in it; so is the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men: it is a poeticized civic and domestic story.
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