Flooded are the brakes and dells
  With thy phantom light,
  And my soul receives the spell
  Of thy mystic night. 
  To the meadow dost thou send
  Something of thy grace,
  Like the kind eye of a friend
  Beaming on my face. 
  Echoes of departed times
  Vibrate in mine ear,
  Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes,
  As I wander here. 
  Flow, flow on, thou little brook,
  Ever onward go! 
  Trusted heart and tender look
  Left me even so! 
  Richer treasure earth has none
  Than I once possessed—­
  Ah! so rich, that when ’twas gone
  Worthless was the rest. 
  Little brook! adown the vale
  Rush and take my song: 
  Give it passion, give it wail,
  As thou leap’st along! 
  Sound it in the winter night
  When thy streams are full,
  Murmur it when skies are bright
  Mirror’d in the pool. 
  Happiest he of all created
  Who the world can shun,
  Not in hate, and yet unhated,
  Sharing thought with none,
  Save one faithful friend, revealing
  To his kindly ear
  Thoughts like these, which o’er me stealing,
  Make the night so drear.

In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm: 

    This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about
    it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars,
    which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring.

To the same year belongs The Fisher, which gave such melodious voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, ’the moist yet radiant blue,’ upon the mood; just as, later on, The Erlking, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding.

Goethe was always an industrious traveller.  In his seventieth year he went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz Mountains (Harzreise, 1777):  ’We went up to the peaks, and down to the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.’  His love for Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the Werther period, gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more temperate.

This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters.  In his first Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from Werther, and his mind was too agitated for quiet observation: 

  Hasten thee, Kronos!... 
  Over stock and stone let thy trot
  Into life straightway lead.... 
  Wide, high, glorious the view
  Gazing round upon life,
  While from mount unto mount
  Hovers the spirit eterne,
  Life eternal foreboding....