Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/202

178 and narrator of fantastic fairy tales, tender-hearted, genial, a lover of mystery. From 1790 to 1793 he attended several universities, was then nearly attracted into a soldier’s life by the excitement of the revolutionary period, but was erelong led into the hardly less exciting hopes and struggles of the new literary and philosophical movement, through an acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel and with Fichte himself, who was then at the height of his earlier professional successes. In Arnstadt, in Thuringia, where Novalis went to learn a more practical profession, in government service, he met and loved a very young girl, Sophie von Kühn. Her eyes suggested to him the famous blaue Blume, which in his romance, “Heinrich v. Ofterdingen,” he afterwards made the symbol of the romantic ideal itself, the mysterious wonder of magic that his hero sees in dream and thenceforth seeks. Readers of Heine’s book on the Romantic School will remember this Blue Flower. Sophie was not yet fourteen when Friedrich v. Hardenberg was betrothed to her. They were never married; and three years later she died, after a long illness, constantly watched to the end by her devoted lover, to whom by this time the worship of his love had become a religion. Her death was the turning-point of his brief career. His mourning for her took a form worthy of a romantic philosopher. He dated a new sacred era from the day of her death, and kept a diary in accordance with his thus established chronology. The diary, which is unfortunately somewhat brief, is devoted to meditations intended to prepare him to meet her in the life beyond. And as for this meeting, he decides to bring it about in a way which shall express and conform his ardent faith in Fichtean principles. Fichte, namely, has said that our will is the master of the universe. Well, to be sure, suicide, in the ordinary sense, is not the philosopher’s way to the other world; but may not one by sheer force of will so purify himself as to become spiritually