Novalis was the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von Hardenberg, the lyric poet and leader of the early German romanticists. Novalis was born of Pietistic parents on the family estate, Oberwiederstedt, in Saxony. In preparation for a civil service career, he studied jurisprudence, philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics at Jena, Leipzig, and finally at Wittenberg, where he completed his studies in 1794. In Jena, Novalis came under the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and especially Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Soon afterward he became friendly with Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Schelling, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter. While apprenticed to a local official in Tennstedt, Novalis became engaged to thirteen-year-old Sophie von Kühn in 1795. Her death in 1797 reinforced his romantic mysticism and culminated in a poetic transfiguration of his loss, in which his love and his desire to follow her into death...