“NOVALIS” died at the age of twenty-nine, after having hinted rather than shown himself to be one of the most extraordinary geniuses of modern times. The volume of his writings in prose and verse is not large, and much of it is not specially remarkable. Some of it, however, is almost supernatural. His was the only genius among the poets of Germany with a higher flight than that of Goethe. It was impossible for such elevation of intellect to be sustained, and so “Novalis” died one of the minor poets of Germany. His name in real life (to which he did not belong) was Friedrich von Hardenberg and he was born at Wiederstedt, May 2d, 1772. After studying jurisprudence at Jena, Leipsic, and Wittenberg, he filled a minor judicial position in Thuringia, but he was not fitted for it and he left it as soon as possible. At his death, March 25th, 1801, he left behind him a novel, a volume of lyric poems, a number of miscellaneous sketches and apothegms, and his “Hymns to the Night,” an extraordinary series of “prose poems,” occasioned by the death of his betrothed, Sophie von Kühn. “Novalis” did his best work at the close of the eighteenth century, and he has sometimes put into his lines more of the real higher mind of humanity than has gone to vivify volumes from the pens of some of the celebrated critical writers of the diffusive school of the last half of the nineteenth.