opone and other poets the yearning to grasp
transcendental things with the senses, to approach the Deity with a love
which cannot be called anything but sensuous. Novalis' _Hymns to the
Night_ are the most magnificent example of this perfect interpenetration
of sensuous and transcendental love, and at the same time represent a
complete fusion of the love he bore to his fiancee, who died young, and
the worship of Mary. Night has opened _infinite eyes_ in us, and we
behold the secret of love unfolding itself in the heart of this poet, at
once unique and pathetic, lofty and morbid. The whole universe he
conceives as a female being for whose embrace he is longing. It is a new
emotion: neither the chaste worship of the Madonna, nor the
sexually-mystic striving to embrace with the soul. The night gives birth
to a foreboding which excites and soothes all vague desires. The lover
thus soliloquises of the night:

In infinite space.
Thou'dst dissolve,
If it held thee not,
If it bound thee not,
And thrilled thee,
That afire
Thou begettest the world.
Verily before thou art I was,
With my sex
The mother sent me
To live in thy world,
And to hallow it
With love.

Here the ancient, mystical longing to become one with God is conceived
under the symbol of the night. (A symbol which we shall meet again,
magnified, in Wagner's _Tristan_.)

Lo! Love has burst its prison.
No parting now shall be,
And life's full tide has risen
Like to a boundless sea.
One night of love supernal,
Only one golden song,
And the face of the Eternal
To light our path along.

In addition, Novalis was a perfect woman-worshipper. He loved the Middle
Ages and Catholicism. "The reformation killed Christianity; henceforth
Christianity has ceased to exist." "Catholicism preached nothing but
love for the holy, beautiful Lady of Christianity, who, endowed with
divine virtue, was able to deliver all loyal hearts from the most
terrible dangers." He wrote hymns to Mary in the style of the pietists,
emphasising more especially the principle of motherliness:

Oh, Mary! At thy altar
A thousand hearts lie prone,
In this drear life of shadows
They yearn for thee alone.
All hoping to recover
From life's distress and smart,
If thou, oh holy Mother,
Wilt take them to thy heart.

He idolised his fiancee, who died young.