This is a true picture of the time!  Man knew that he was sick, and fled from town and his fellows into solitude, there to dream himself back to a happier past, and revel in the purity and innocence, the healing breath, of forest and field.

The magic of moonlight began to be felt.  Mirtilla

perceived his old father slumbering in the moonbeams....  Mirtilla stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly on the old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy bedewed his cheeks....  How beautiful! how beautiful is the landscape!  How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven through the broken clouds!  They fly, they pass away, these towering clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny landscape....  Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture!  From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild influence nourishes, all is wonderful!  What rapture overpowers me when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and examine the various flowers and herbs and their little inhabitants; when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry heavens!...  Wrapt in each other’s arms, let us contemplate the approach of morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams of moonlight; and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us breathe out in broken accents our praises and thanksgivings.  Ah! what inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the transports of the tenderest love.

Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards Nature.

The aesthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote On the Beauty of Nature.  Crugot’s widely-read work of edification, Christ in Solitude (1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical and pietist clergy; and Spalding’s Human Vocation[9] (written with a warmth that reminds one of Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed.  He says: 

Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great sensitiveness, nourish my mind...  I open eye and ear, and through these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides:  flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round me....  How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in blossom,