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.

_The Novices at Saïs_, a mystical contemplation of nature reminding us
of the discourses of Jakob Böhme, has some suggestion of the
symbolistic lore of parts of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and proves a
most racking riddle to the uninitiated. The penetration into the
meaning of the Veiled Image of Nature is attempted from the point of
view that all is symbolic: only poetic, intuitive souls may enter in;
the merely physical investigator is but searching through a
charnel-house. Nature, the countenance of Divinity, reveals herself to
the childlike spirit; to such she will, at her own good pleasure,
disclose herself spontaneously, though gradually. This seems to be the
inner meaning of the episodic tale, _Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom_. The
rhythmic prose _Hymns to Night_ exhale a delicate melancholy, moving
in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a
knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than
experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the
mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above
life. In his _Spiritual Poems_ we feel a simple, passionate intensity
of adoration, a yearning sympathy for the hopeless and the
heavy-laden; in their ardent assurance of love, peace, and rest, they
are surely to be reckoned among the most intimate documents in the
whole archives of the "varieties of religious experience."

The unfinished novel _Henry of Ofterdingen_ reaches a depth of
obscurity which is saved from absurdity only by the genuinely fervent
glow of a soul on the quest for its mystic ideals: "The blue flower it