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He had once spent several weeks there, recovering from an illness, and the gardens, the trimly bedded flowers, the glancing sunlight in the utter silence of the corridors, were things he could not forget. He had lain day for day on a garden-bench, reading Novalis, and it still seemed to him that the wishless happiness of those days was the greatest he had known.
Wherein did these ideals fail? The first mentioned in exalting power over principle, might over right. As was well said by the philosophical Novalis: “The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of physical strength, of the most vigorous life. Even the gods must know of suffering, and partake, in incarnations, of the miseries of men.
But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, "character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
His sweet astonishment grew with the wondrous transformation. All at once he heard his mother's voice calling him, and awoke in his parents' room, already flooded with the gold of the morning sun. From the German of Novalis.
To make up the tale of pages in this little book without breaking its uniformity, I have added a translation of the "Hymns to Night" of Novalis. It is a translation made by myself seven-and-forty years ago, and printed in a student's magazine that I then edited. "Novalis" was the name assumed by a poet, Friedrich von Hardenberg, who died on the 25th March, 1801, aged twenty-nine.
Such a journal as the Athenaeum, with its over-emphasis on the esthetic, with its fighting spirit, its excoriating, inexorable wit, its constructive and destructive criticism, its complete and total silence on Schiller, would have been an impossibility in the later period. The feeling for and thinking in Fragments, as practised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, was foreign to the new school.
He was an amateur gymnast, hence his anatomical eye; a patron, in a blasé way, of the prize-ring; a man who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent, gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were worth in his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing, in heaven, earth, or hell, but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant as summer water, until his Self was touched, when it was ice, though brilliant still.
Love first revealed the poetic gift in Novalis; and in reading the Autobiography of Goethe, one can but notice the quickening of his powers after every new experience: a new love was a new push given the shuttle, and a new thread was added.
At Hanover, five years later, was born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in May 1772, and our Coleridge in the same year and to carry on the parallel for another year, Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were all born in 1773.
We may be converted by the Japanese, for all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and make room for a better order of beings?
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