But while he stayed down below, things in the upper world pursued their usual course. The outer world was not in the least disturbed because the poet and the philosopher were employed in taking it to pieces in the inner world. For they did not go to work in the rough, material fashion of a Mirabeau or a Bonaparte; they only disintegrated it inwardly in an inner world. When the poet, released by the spirits, came up from the mine again, he found the outer world, which he supposed he had resolved into its elements, exactly as it had been before. All that he had melted in his heart stood there, hard and cold; and, since the outer world had never really interested him, and since it seemed to him almost as night-like, murky, and drowsy as his inner world, he gave it his blessing and let it stand. The prophetic quality in Novalis, his peculiar type of personal beauty, his genuine lyric talent, and his early death, have led critics to compare him with Shelley, who was born twenty years after him. Quite lately, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, Blaze de Bury drew attention to the resemblance. He writes: "Shelley's poetry has a strong resemblance to Novalis's, and the likeness between these two singular poets is not only a physical one; common to them both are close observation of nature, divination of all her little secrets, a choice combination of sentiment with philosophical thought, an utter want of tangibility, reflections, but no body, a mounting upwards, an aspiration, that leads nowhere." These resemblances, however, do not affect the great fundamental unlikeness, the diametrically opposed spiritual standpoints of these two poets of such an apparently similar cast of mind, one of whom lives before, the other after the great spiritual revulsion of the beginning of this century.