And paints with colours of the heavenly bow
The clouds that o'er thy dusky cataracts climb.
Why hasten so to the cerulean sea?
Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good?
Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks?
Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed?
Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;
Youth, thou art here,
Strong as a god,
Free as a god,
Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below,
The wavering lustre of the silent sea,
Now softly silvered by the swimming moon,
Now rosy golden in the western beam;
Youth, what is silken rest,
And what the smiling of the friendly moon,
Or gold or purple of the evening sun,
To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds?
Here thou canst wildly stream
As bids thy heart;
Below are masters, ever-changeful minds,
Or the dead stillness of the servile main.
Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;
Youth, thou art here,
Strong as a god,
Free as a god.

Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and
grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of
idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic
mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for
Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a
bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day.

CHAPTER XI

THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC

Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete change
in the culture of their time by their revolutionary originality. In
such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins again. Out of
touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling taste and mode of
thought, they are a law unto themselves, and naturally tend to
measure all things by themselves, while their too great subjectivity
is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of passion and the
conviction of the prophet.

Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of
subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but
degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example.

Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced
forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established
condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went
on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for
his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived
in introspection