The Neuland orderer was the early accomplished poet-genius among the German romantics, but also an administrative lawyer and saltworks assessor. Not least because of these very different fields of activity, he perceived humanity and the environment, spirit and nature as a unity, which he shaped in various ways in his works—seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, the infinite in the finite. In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, he created the symbol of the blue flower, which became the epitome of romantic longing, and his hymns to the night are arguably the most significant poetry of early German Romanticism. His saying that every beloved object is the center of a paradise was based not least on his own deep feelings, as he experienced them in the mysterious love for the barely thirteen-year-old Sophie von Kühn or in conversations with his friends in Jena, including Fichte, Tieck, and the Schlegel brothers.