But the principal thing to which I would draw attention is, that reality is here refined and distilled in a manner unknown to Goethe. It is attenuated into vapour--emotional vapour; personality is drowned in landscape, action in the music of the woodman's horn. In _Sternbald_ every day is a Sunday; a devotional feeling pervades the air; we seem to hear the church bells ring and to know that the world is at leisure. The following words of the hero contain the philosophy of the book: "In this world we can only desire, we can only live in intentions; real action belongs to the hereafter." Consequently there is no action in the story; the characters wander about with as little apparent purpose as comets; their lives consist of a series of accidental, unsought adventures; they are always travelling in search of the ideal, and as the ideal is generally supposed to have taken up its abode somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rome, the book ends there--the _story_ is not brought to a conclusion, and is never continued. It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis prefers _Sternbald_ to _Wilhelm Meister_. "For," says he, "the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." The world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos--chaos which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen. These obscure, yet in a manner unambiguous expressions of Novalis's opinions on the subject of the true nature of poetry and romance, make it easy for us to understand his judgment of _Wilhelm Meister_, a book he had greatly admired in early youth. For in _Wilhelm Meister_, as in _Torquato Tasso_, poetry has to give way to reality, the poetic conception of life to the practical. Novalis could imagine nothing more shameful than this; it was sin against the holy spirit of poetry. In the novel, in fiction, poetry is not to be done away with, not even to be restricted, but to be exalted and glorified.