Novalis (1772–1801,) pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von (baron of) Hardenberg, was an early German Romantic poet and novelist. This “Prophet of Romanticism” was the leading poet and imaginative writer of the early German Romantic Movement. His poetry, along with his prose writings, voices a mystical fervor in the symbolic meaning and unity of life.
Born of an aristocratic Moravian family in Wiederstedt, Saxony, Novalis was educated at the universities of Jena, Leipzig (where he made friends with the British philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the aesthetician Friedrich Schlegel,) and Wittenberg. Novalis was engaged to 13-year-old Sophie von Kühn, who died of tuberculosis in 1797. Her death distressed him deeply, and, in her memory, he wrote the prose lyrics of Hymnen an die Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Night, 1948.)
Novalis also published Geistliche lieder (1799; Devotional Songs, 1910.) He left two philosophical romances, both unfinished, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) and Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802, ‘The Apprentices at Sais.’)
Novalis’s essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799, ‘Christendom or Europe’) appeals for a universal Christian church to reinstate a Europe whose medieval cultural, social, and intellectual unity had been damaged by the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Novalis
Character is a perfectly educated will.
—Novalis
Happy those who here on earth have dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come.
—Novalis
To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.
—Novalis
The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
—Novalis
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