and yet amid a splendor that he had never seen; then
even the last tinge of earthliness vanished as though dissipated in
the air, and he stood before the celestial virgin. He lifted the
filmy, shimmering veil and Roseblossom fell into his arms. From afar a
strain of music accompanied the mystery of the loving reunion, the
outpourings of their longing, and excluded all that was alien from
this delightful spot. After that Hyacinth lived many years with
Roseblossom near his happy parents and comrades, and innumerable
grandchildren thanked the mysterious old woman for her advice and her
fire; for at that time people got as many children as they wanted.

APHORISMS[33]

By NOVALIS

TRANSLATED BY FREDERIC H. HEDGE

Where no gods are, spectres rule.

The best thing that the French achieved by their Revolution, was a
portion of Germanity.

Germanity is genuine popularity, and therefore an ideal.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Spirit is now active here and there: when will Spirit be active in the
whole? When will mankind, in the mass, begin to consider?

Nature is pure Past, foregone freedom; and therefore, throughout, the
soil of history.

The antithesis of body and spirit is one of the most remarkable and
dangerous of all antitheses. It has played an important part in
history.

Only by comparing ourselves, as men, with other rational beings, could
we know what we truly are, what position we occupy.

The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history. And, in
general, only that history is history which might also be fable.

The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and
ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of
every man should be a Bible.

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to
make religion.

The more sinful man feels himself, the more Christian he is.

Christianity is opposed to science, to art, to enjoyment in the proper
sense.

It goes forth from the common man. It inspires the great majority of
the limited on earth.

It is the germ of all democracy, the highest fact in the domain of the
popular.

Light is the symbol of genuine self-possession. Therefore light,
according to analogy, is the action of the self-contact of matter.
Accordingly, day is the consciousness of the planet, and while the
sun, like a god, in eternal self-action, inspires the centre, one
planet after another closes one ey