When Wilhelm suffers his first great loss in the Lehrjahre, that of Mariane, he recovers his spirits on his travels by re-immersing himself in the natural world. He is revived by the rejuvenating power of nature, but also by the animating power of memory:

This passage illustrates what Novalis, partly on the basis of this novel, identified as one of the central hallmarks of Romanticism: the mysterious play of memory and premonition: “Nichts ist poetischer als Erinnerung und Ahndung oder Vorstellung der Zukunft” (Nothing is more poetic than remembrance and premonition or imagination of the future). For Hardenberg, the sense of presence proper to the poet is not a punctual “now” ordered within a linear series of “nows.” The poet's “geistige Gegenwart” (spiritual present) is rather a present “die beide [Erinnerung und Ahnung] durch Auflösung identifiziert— und diese Mischung ist das Element, die Atmosphäre des Dichters” (Novalis 2: 468, n. 123; that dissolves [memory and premonition] into an identity— and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet). In creating the “atmosphere” of Poesie, the pre-rational communication between past and present, present and future, becomes a distinctive feature of Romantic interiority.