Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg: 

It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of Mecklenburg; ’tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, which wakes echoes.  Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is always trying to find them in his walks.

This illustrates the lines in Stintenburg: 

           Isle of pious solitude,
  Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc.

but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry.

He wrote of Soroe,[12] one of the loveliest places in the Island of Zealand, as ‘an uncommonly pleasant place’; where ’By a sacred tree, on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island ...  Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the tree-tops.’

The day on which he composed The Lake of Zurich was one of the pleasantest in his life.  Cramer says:  ’He has often told me and still tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this excursion:  the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.’

But, unlike St Preux, he ’seemed less impressed by our scenery than by the beauty of our girls,[13] and his letters bear out the remark.[14] Yet delight in Nature was always with him:  Klopstock’s lofty morality pours forth all through it.  Nature, love, fame, wine, everything is looked at from an ennobling point of view.’

  Fair is the majesty of all thy works
  On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair! 
  But fairer the glad face
  Enraptured with their view. 
  Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake,
  Or—­hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew—­
  Come on the roseate tip
  Of evening’s breezy wing,
  And teach my song with glee of youth to glow,
  Sweet joy, like thee—­with glee of shouting youths,
  Or feeling Fanny’s laugh.

  Behind us far already Uto lay. 
  At whose feet Zurich in the quiet vale
  Feeds her free sons:  behind—­
  Receding vine-clad hills. 
  Uncloud’d beamed the top of silver Alps,
  And warmer beat the heart of gazing youths,
  And warmer to their fair
  Companions spoke its glow. 
  And Haller’s Doris sang, the pride of song;
  And Hirzel’s Daphne, dear to Kleist and Gleim;
  And we youths sang and felt
  As each were—­Hagedorn.

  Soon the green meadow took us to the cool
  And shadowy forest, which becrowns the isle. 
  Then cam’st thou, Joy; thou cam’st
  Down in full tide to us;
  Yes, goddess Joy, thyself; we felt, we clasp’d,
  Best sister of humanity, thyself,
  With thy dear innocence
  Accompanied, thyself.