stealing,
  Dance joyously the verdant vales along;
  Cold fear no more the songster’s tongue is sealing,
  Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song. 
  And all their bright and lovely hues revealing,
  A thousand plants the field and forest throng;
  Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers,
  And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.

All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature.  The hero of his novel William Lovell, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.

He wrote from Florence: 

Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty.  I am often full of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is satisfied.  Even as a child, when I stood outside my father’s country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.

Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all our feelings and strange experiences.  Night surrounded me with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal dome overhead—­in this world the most unusual feelings were as shadows.

‘Franz Sternbald’ had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature: 

I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my music with a thousand tongues.[20]

To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music.  ‘For thought is too distant.’  Night and the forest, moonlight and starlight, were in all their songs.

There is a background of landscape all through Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings.

In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to fill up the page.

Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in Werther tunes scenery and soul to one key.  In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery.  Jean Paul, like Tieck in Franz Sternbald, never spares us one sunset or sunrise.  Some of Tieck’s concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore Storm’s at the present day: