into the night....  The full moon rising from the clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the scenes of Ossian just present to our minds.

His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli: 

    (If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to
    view this scene so fair!  And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee
    not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?)

and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature.

There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its being in Nature as Werther.[11] In Wahrheit und Dichtung Goethe said of the ‘strange element’ in which Werther was designed and written: 

I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act upon me, each after its own kind.  Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else could happen, affected me in the deepest manner.  The glance of the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations as they extended on all sides.

The strong influence of La Nouvelle Heloise upon Werther was very evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe’s feeling for Nature and Rousseau’s.  Rousseau had the painter’s eye, but not the keen poetic vision.

Goethe’s romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to his nation, and by virtue of which in Werther, the outer world, the scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with the hero’s mood.  The contrast between culture and Nature is always marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism.  As a work of art, Werther is excellent, La Nouvelle Heloise is not.  Goethe used his hero’s bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits—­a faculty which only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him.

The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights.  Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and feeling—­and what at that time was not?—­was repugnant to Werther; what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and uneducated people.