environed him like some tale of fiction, and that realm which most men conceive as something far and incomprehensible was the very Home of his Soul." He was not quite twenty-nine years old at the time of his peaceful death, which plunged the circle of his Romantic friends into deepest grief. The envelope of his spiritual nature was so tenuous that he seemed to respond to all the subtler influences of the universe; a sensitive chord attuned to poetic values, he appeared to exercise an almost mediumistic refraction and revelation of matters which lie only in the realm of the transcendental-- "Weaving about the commonplace of things The golden haze of morning's blushing glow." In reading Novalis, it is hardly possible to discriminate between discourse and dreaming; his passion was for remote, never-experienced things-- "Ah, lonely stands, and merged in woe, Who loves the past with fervent glow!" His homesickness for the invisible world became an almost sensuous yearning for the joys of death. In the first volume of the _Athenæum_ (1798) a place of honor was given to his group of apothegms, _Pollen_ (rather an unromantic translation for "_Blüthenstaub_"); these were largely supplemented by materials found after his death, and republished as _Fragments_. In the last volume of the same journal (1800) appeared his _Hymns to Night_. Practically all of his other published works are posthumous: his unfinished novel, _Henry of Ofterdingen_; a set of religious hymns; the beginnings of a "physical novel," _The Novices at Saïs_. Novalis's aphoristic "seed-thoughts" reveal Fichte's transcendental idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on life. The external world is but a shadow; the universe is in us; there, or nowhere, is infinity, with all its systems, past or future; the world is but a precipitate of human nature.