the country round it which is still wrapt in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart....

On November 30th he wrote:  ’About dinner-time I went to walk by the river side, for I had no appetite,’ and goes on in the tone of Ossian: 

    Everything around me seemed gloomy:  a cold and damp easterly wind
    blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the
    plain.

and in the dreadful night of the flood: 

Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth.  I beheld a fearful sight.  The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake which was agitated by the roaring wind.  And when the moon shone forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and delight.  With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, and cried ‘Plunge!’ For a moment my senses forsook me, in the intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge into that gulf.

To his farewell letter he adds: 

    Yes, Nature! put on mourning.  Your child, your friend, your
    lover, draws near his end.

The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and sentimentality, was the spring of Werther’s feeling, is seen in loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of Faust, when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos: 

  How all things live and work, and ever blending,
  Weave one vast whole from Being’s ample range! 
  How powers celestial, rising and descending,
  Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange. 
  Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
  From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
  Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing.

And the Earth spirit says: 

  In the currents of life, in action’s storm,
  I float and I wave
  With billowy motion,—­
  Birth and the grave
  A limitless ocean.

Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said: 

  Inscrutable in broadest light,
  To be unveiled by force she doth refuse.

But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness: 

  Thou full-orbed moon!  Would thou wert gazing now
  For the last time upon my troubled brow!

and

  Loos’d from their icy fetters, streams and rills
  In spring’s effusive, quick’ning mildness flow,
  Hope’s budding promise every valley fills. 
  And winter, spent with age, and powerless now,
  Draws off his forces to the savage hills.