The longing took curiously morbid forms in the less healthy Romantic souls. The well-known German author, Franz Horn, informs us in his autobiography that at the age of three or four he was already capable of poetic longing and suffering, and of divining life in apparently dead things. He goes on to say that the child-like mysticism of a certain popular refrain had a perfectly magic attraction for him. He quotes the verse in question, and it proves to be none other than the good old rhyme: "Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home!" "Maikäfer flieg! Dein Vater ist im Krieg, Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland, Und Pommerland ist abgebrannt, Maikäfer flieg!"[4] The other children were hard-hearted enough to laugh at this poem, but to him it seemed most touching. The unhappy cockchafer was fatherless and motherless. His father was in the wars, and "what might not come of that?" And his mother? Of her "the news was still more uncertain." She was in far-off Pomerania, and Pomerania was on fire! What scope for fancy! And there was the poor cockchafer, too, borne on the wings of his longing out into the wide, wide world, seeking, ever seeking.--We positively feel as if we were turning into children again. But let us return to the idea that underlies all this. The longing of the individual for infinite happiness rests, as has already been said, upon the belief that this infinite happiness is attainable by man. But this belief, in its turn, rests upon the individual's Romantic conviction of his own infinite importance. The doctrine of immortality itself is only a result of belief in the cosmic importance of the individual. And this belief in the infinite importance of each separate individual is genuinely medieval. Whole sciences, such as astrology, were founded upon it. The very stars of heaven were supposed to have a close connection with the destinies of individual men, and actually to occupy themselves with them. Heaven and earth and all that in them is, revolved round man. The Romanticists naturally feel the want of astrology, and would fain have the science restored. What they call the "blue flower" is what in astrology was called a man's planet, and in alchemy, the philosopher's stone.