Novalis

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg was born into minor Saxon aristocracy in 1772, the second of eleven children in a strict Pietist household. He studied law at Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg, befriending Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel along the way, and finished his degree at 22. Working as a legal assistant in Tennstedt, he met and secretly engaged Sophie von Kühn; she fell ill and died just after turning 15, a loss that marked him forever. In 1797 he enrolled at Freiberg's mining university, studying everything from electricity to natural philosophy, conversing with Goethe, Schelling, and Jean Paul. He later directed salt mines in Saxony and Thuringia while writing Hymns to the Night and his unfinished novels Heinrich von Ofterdingen and The Novices at Sais. Signs of illness - likely tuberculosis or cystic fibrosis - appeared in 1800, and he died in March 1801. Schlegel and Tieck published his literary works the following year; his notebooks, released fully only in the twentieth century, revealed how deeply he wove philosophy and science into fragments that became foundational texts of Early German Romanticism.