He enthusiastically predicts the coming age of "soul." "In Germany we can already point to sure indications of a new world.... Here and there, and often in daring union, are to be found incomparable versatility, brilliant polish, extensive knowledge, and rich and powerful imagination. A strong feeling of the creative arbitrariness, the boundlessness, the infinite many-sidedness, the sacred originality, and the unlimited capacity of the human spirit is taking possession of men.... Although these are only indications, disconnected and crude, they nevertheless discover to the historic eye a universal individuality, new history, a new humanity, the sweet embrace of a loving God and a young, surprised Church, and the conception of a new Messiah in the hearts of all the many thousands of that Church's members. Who does not, with sweet shame, feel himself pregnant? The child will be the express image of the father--a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body." After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. And what is the upshot of it all? What new being is the result of the embraces of a loving God and a young, surprised Church? What but a regenerated reaction, which in France restored Catholicism and (after Napoleon's fall) the Bourbons, and in Germany led to that hateful tyranny which gave pietism the same power there that Catholicism exercised in France, cast young men into prison, and drove the best writers of the day into exile. Novalis relegated everything to the inner life, the inner world. It engulfed everything, the forces of the Revolution and of the counter-revolution; in it all the lions of the spirit lay bound; in it the Titanic powers of history were shut up and hypnotised. Night surrounded them; they felt the voluptuous joys of darkness and death; the life they lived was the life of a plant, and in the end they turned into stone. In the inner world lay all the wealth of the spirit, but it was dead treasure, inert masses, ingeniously crystallized according to mathematical laws. It was like the gold and silver in the inward parts of the earth, and the poet was the miner who was spirited down into the depths and rejoiced in all that he saw.