Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in
    waves along them.

The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming into view one by one in the sky—­all this moved him deeply, moved him to a wistful compassion for himself.

As Franz wanders about the wood: 

He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond.  He had never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in the clear water.  Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be represented.

Tieck’s shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature—­reflections in water, rays of light, cloud forms: 

    They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record
    that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special
    colour to his spiritual life.[21]

The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind.  This mind it became the chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.

From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena and elementary human feeling. Blond Egbert was the earliest example of this: 

    Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without
    rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through
    breaks in the driving clouds.[22]

In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among the mountains.

The Runenberg gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold.

The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, are contrasted with idyllic plains.  The tale is sprinkled over with descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23]

The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis.  With him everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the search for ‘the blue flower.’  This is from Heinrich von Ofterdingen: