This excess of despair, and also the singular circumstance that Sophie, who died at the age of fifteen, was only twelve years old when he fell in love with her, seem to testify to something unhealthy and abnormal in Novalis's character. The impression is strengthened when we find him, only one year later, betrothed to a daughter of Von Charpentier, superintendent of mines. It is quite true, as La Rochefoucauld says, that the strength of our passions has no relation to their durability; nevertheless it is strange that Hardenberg could suddenly console himself with another, after finding his one pleasure for a whole year in the thought of death, talking for a whole year as if the grave held everything that was dear to him. It was a somewhat lame excuse that Julie seemed to him a reincarnation of Sophie, though the fancy was not a surprising one, considering how much the Romanticists dwelt on the idea of a previous existence. But here, as elsewhere in Hardenberg's life, much that is apparently unnatural is easily explainable when the circumstances are rightly understood. Sophie von Kühn seems, like Auguste Böhmer, to have been a most precocious child. When the youth of twenty-three made her acquaintance, she possessed all the attractions of the child combined with those of the maiden. Her features were fine, her curly head was lightly poised, and there was a whole world in her large, dark, expressive eyes. More impartial judges than Hardenberg have called her "a heavenly creature."