ABSTRACT
Of the great German romantic poets, Navalis is the most problematic, not because he is less, but because he is more romantic than the others, because he approaches more closely to the ideal of Romanticism. He is the romantic poet of love, in this ideal sense, par excellence. This chapter leads to a pattern of escalation which is typical of Novalis's structural technique, to the revelation of the nature of love. The raising of the stone is used in the fourth of the Geistliche Lieder to render both the understanding of the atonement and what is unmistakably the Sophie-experience. In the Hymnen an die Nacht, Novalis sets out, not only to assert and demonstrate the primacy of the spiritual world over the material – an opposition from which essential elements of the cycle's structure are derived – but also to investigate one of the central mysteries of the spirit, namely love.
