A fictionalized biography of the 18th century German poet, Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, who wrote under the nom de plume, Novalis. The novel centers on his philosophy ("My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.") and on his romance with Sophie von Kuhn, 12, who became his muse, but who died of tuberculosis before they could marry. By the author of The Gates of Angels.

"The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular., brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death. Yet twentieth-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge...