friend of Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Novalis. Educated in law at Göttingen and Leipzig, he subsequently devoted himself to literature, being in 1798 one of the founders of the Athenaeum, a principal organ of Romantic and classically oriented circles at Jena. His later study of Sanskrit and of Indian civilization contributed to his outstanding work, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India, 1808), after which he entered the service of Prince Metternich and the Austrian court, veering from his youthful radicalism to a kind of Catholic mysticism. Books include The Philosophy of History (trs. 1835), The Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language (trs. 1847), and The History of Literature (trs. 1859).