No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German word "Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous words of the "Wanderer's Sturmlied":—
"Innre Wärme,
Seelenwärme,
Mittelpunkt!
Glüh entgegen
Phöb-Apollon,
Kalt wird sonst
Sein Fürstenblick
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Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life. With those who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the centripetal force of the spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above all else in human life, fervour becomes a patent of nobility. In their conception of soul, as in everything else, the Romanticists rush to extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious, dark, and unexplained in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and beautiful. Goethe is to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his plastic power, but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery, surrounding such characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the pregnant intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen, energetic thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such qualities are not soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul.
The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"—warmth of soul—into heat, a heat which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto.
Friedrich von Hardenberg, a scion of an ancient house, was born at Wiederstedt, in the County of Mansfeld, in May 1772. His father, a man of a vigorous, ardent nature, had, after "leading a very worldly life," been converted at the age of thirty-one, when in great distress because of his first wife's death, to the faith of the English Methodists. At a later period he fell under the influence of the Moravian Brethren, more particularly of Count Zinzendorf; and he was at all times strongly influenced by his elder brother, a bigoted and somewhat ignorant aristocrat of pietistic leanings. The elder brother's will was law in the younger's household after the latter's second marriage; his strict principles forbade the family all social intercourse, and the children were obliged to keep their youthful amusements carefully concealed. In 1787 Novalis's father was appointed director of the saltworks in the little town of Weissenfels.
NOVALIS