Called “the Holy and ardent Novalis” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, this visionary poet, born Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (1772-1801), was a founding father of Romanticism. Born on this day in Oberwiederstedt, Germany, he chose the pen name Novalis from a family lineage.

With sensitive grace, he once reflected, “We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.” Ethereal and searching, the line captures the quiet longing that shaped his every word.

Romantic to his soul, Novalis wrote with philosophy and lyrical fire, his passion fixated on ideal love. His symbolic blue flower expressed a longing for the infinite—a tender ache for all that is just out of reach. “Every beloved object is the center of a paradise,” he believed.

Tragedy fueled his poetry. When his 14-year-old fiancée Sophie died of tuberculosis, Novalis channeled his grief into the transcendent Hymns to the Night. Seven months later, he too died of the same illness. His final days were illuminated by longing, by metaphor, by devotion to mystery.

“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” he wrote. He viewed death not as an end but a passage. A Resurrection. His soul touched those who would come after, from Hermann Hesse to Rilke.

To read Novalis is to walk beside starlight.

“There is but one temple in the universe,” he said, “and that is the body of man.”