Poet, novelist, clergyman, and scholar, author of the extraordinary novella Mozart's Journey from Vienna to Prague (1855), Mörike is not only one of the great German poets but also a writer who deeply inspired composers, including Schumann, Brahms, and especially Wolf. Born in 1804, Mörike studied theology at Tübingen, receiving his ordination as a Lutheran pastor in 1826. As a student, he had an unhappy love affair with Maria Meyer, a tragic wanderer, whom he immortalized in a poetic cycle and portrayed in his novella Maler Nolten (1832). Mörike found the career of clergyman pure torture; he retired in 1843 to devote himself to literature. He married in 1851 and settled in Stuttgart, where he taught literature until 1866. Mörike died in 1875. While all poetry is by nature musical, Mörike's musicality is truly exceptional. Not only are his poems replete with musical symbolism, but his extraordinary handling of sounds and rhythmic patterns evokes the magical fluidity of a musical composition. Like music, Mörike's writings introduce the reader to a rich world of ideas, feelings, images, and mystical insights resulting from the poet's effort to imaginatively transcend the limitations, spatial and temporal, of human existence. Not surprisingly, the composer who embodied Mörike's exalted idea of music was Mozart, another artist in whose work listeners discern signs of transcendence. Mörike's uncanny ability to translate the experience music into poetry is exemplified by his poem "An Wilhelm Hartlaub" (To Wilhelm Hartlaub), in which the poet vividly and suggestively describes his boundless joy in hearing his friend play a piano piece, perhaps by Mozart. Another example of Mörike's supreme mastery of the art of poetry is "Schlafendes Jesuskind" (Sleeping Christ-Child), set to music by Wolf (No. 25 of his Mörike-Lieder, in which the poet, serenely setting aside any religious skepticism caused by theological intellectualism, reveals, blending eloquent images and illuminating poetic harmonies, a vulnerable child's divine essence.