The Blue Flower

Stories about the thing a life is spent looking for: a knight who follows a legend, a Persian magus who follows a star, a man who finds the blue flower and does not recognize it. Van Dyke was a Princeton professor, a clergyman and Wilson's minister to the Netherlands during the war; he took his title from Novalis, and these 1902 tales are the American Romantic in his best form. Fifty-seven plates of Romantic landscape by painters including Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch follow the same long search through mountains, forests and forked roads.