Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled Brockes.

Julian Schmidt says[3]:  ’Later on, descriptive poetry, like didactic, fell into disgrace; but at that time this dwelling upon the minutiae of Nature served to enrich the imagination; Kleist’s descriptions are thoughtful and interesting.’  It is easy to see that his longer poems cost him much labour; they were not the pure songs of feeling that gush out spontaneously like a spring from the rock.  But in eloquence and keenness of observation he excelled his contemporaries, although he, too, followed the fashion of eighteenth-century literature, and coquetted with Greek nymphs and deities, and the names of winds and maidens.

The tendency to depression, increased by his failure to adapt himself to military life, made him incline more and more to solitude.

To Doris begins: 

  Now spring doth warm the flakeless air,
  And in the brook the sky reflects her blue,
  Shepherds in fragrant flowers find delight ... 
  The corn lifts high its golden head,
  And Zephyr moves in waves across the grain,
  Her robe the field embroiders; the young rush
  Adorns the border of each silver stream,
  Love seeks the green night of the forest shade,
  And air and sea and earth and heaven smile.

Sighs for Rest: 

  O silver brook, my leisure’s early soother,
  When wilt thou murmur lullabies again? 
  When shall I trace thy sliding smooth and smoother,
  While kingfishers along thy reeds complain;
  Afar from thee with care and toil opprest,
  Thy image still can calm my troubled breast.

  O ye fair groves and odorous violet valleys,
  Girt with a garland blue of hills around,
  Thou quiet lake, where, when Aurora sallies,
  Her golden tresses seem to sweep the ground: 
  Soft mossy turf, on which I wont to stray,
  For me no longer bloom thy flow’rets gay. 
  As when the chilly nights of March arise
  And whirl the howling dust in eddies swift,
  The sunbeams wither in the dimmer skies,
  O’er the young ears the sand and pebbles drift: 
  So the war rages, and the furious forces
  The air with smoke bespread, the field with corses.

  The vineyard bleeds, and trampled is the com,
  Orchards but heat the kettles of the camp....

  As when a lake which gushing rains invade
  Breaks down its dams, and fields are overflowed. 
  So floods of fire across the region spread,
  And standing corn by crackling flames is mowed: 
  Bellowing the cattle fly; the forests burn,
  And their own ashes the old stems in-urn.

  He too, who fain would live in purity,
  Feels nature treacherous, hears examples urge,
  As one who, falling overboard at sea,
  Beats with his arms and feet the buoyant surge,
  And climbs at length against some rocky brink,
  Only beneath exhausted strength to sink.