This lack of definite object appears just as clearly in the German symbol of romantic love--the blue flower. The blue flower resolves itself at last, it will be remembered, into a fair feminine face[149]--a face that cannot, however, be overtaken. The color typifies the blue distance in which it always loses itself, “the never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire.” The object is thus elusive because, as I have said, it is not, properly speaking, an object at all but only a dalliance of the imagination with its own dream. Cats, says Rivarol, do not caress us, they caress themselves upon us. But though cats may suffer from what the new realist calls the egocentric predicament, they can scarcely vie in the subtle involutions of their egoism with the romantic lover. Besides creating the symbol of the blue flower, Novalis treats romantic love in his unfinished tale “The Disciples at Saïs.” He contemplated two endings to this tale--in the one, when the disciple lifts the veil of the inmost sanctuary of the temple at Saïs, Rosenblütchen (the equivalent of the blue flower) falls into his arms. In the second version what he sees when he lifts the mysterious veil is--“wonder of wonders--himself.” The two endings are in substance the same. The story of Novalis’s attachment for a fourteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn, and of his plans on her death for a truly romantic suicide--a swooning away into the night--and then of the suddenness with which he transferred his dream to another maiden, Julie von Charpentier, is familiar. If Sophie had lived and Novalis had lived and they had wedded, he might conceivably have made her a faithful husband, but she would no longer have been the blue flower, the ideal. For one’s love is for something infinitely remote; it is as Shelley says, in what is perhaps the most perfect expression of romantic longing: The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow. The sphere of Shelley’s sorrow at the time he wrote these lines to Mrs. Williams was Mary Godwin. In the time of Harriet Westbrook, Mary had been the “star.” The romantic lover often feigns in explanation of his nostalgia that in some previous existence he had been enamored of a nymph--an Egeria--or a woman transcending the ordinary mould--“some Lilith or Helen or Antigone.”[150] Shelley inquires eagerly in one of his letters about the new poem by Horace Smith, “The Nympholept.” In the somewhat unclassical sense that the term came to have in the romantic movement, Shelley is himself the perfect example of the nympholept. In this respect as in others, however, he merely continues Rousseau. “If it had not been for some memories of my youth and Madame d’Houdetot,” says Jean-Jacques, “the loves that I have felt and described would have been only with sylphids.”[151]