The early Romantic movement found its purest expression in the person
and writings of Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known under his
assumed literary name Novalis (1772-1801). Both his father, Baron von
Hardenberg (chief director of the Saxon salt-works), and his mother
belonged to the Moravians, that devoted group of mystical pietists
whose sincere consecration to the things of the spirit has achieved a
deathless place in the annals of the religious history of the
eighteenth century, and, more particularly, determined the beginnings
and the essential character of the world-wide Methodist movement. His
gentle life presents very little of dramatic incident: he was a
reserved, somewhat unsocial boy, greatly devoted to study and to the
reading of poetry. He was given a most thorough education, and, while
completing his university career, became acquainted with Friedrich
Schlegel, and remained his most intimate friend. He also came to know
Fichte, and eagerly absorbed his _Doctrine of Science_. A little later
he came into close relations with Wilhelm Schlegel and Tieck in Jena.
He experienced a seraphic love for a delicate girl of thirteen, whose
passing away at the age of fifteen served to transport the youth's
interests almost exclusively to the invisible world: "Life is a
sickness of the spirit, a passionate Doing." His chief conversation
lay in solitude, in seeking for a mystic inner solution of the secrets
of external nature. He loved to discourse on these unseen realms, and
to create an ideal connection between them all. The testimony of his
friend Tieck, who in company with Friedrich Schlegel edited his works
in a spirit of almost religious piety, runs: "The common life
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.