he charms of romantic scenery at
home.

The Isle of Ruegen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking
contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods,
came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road
from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]--so much so, in
fact, that in 1805 Gruembke was complaining that many people only went
there to feast, not to enjoy the scene:

You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and
drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is
desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully
beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on
the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge
azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should
find a place--the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and
mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of
the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are
necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either
alone or with intimate and congenial friends.

CHAPTER XII

THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF
MODERN TIMES

The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of
Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and
Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the
Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling
for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and
Goettingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but
their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and
his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight
and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter
excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains,
was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid
strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all
his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which
lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful
souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and
_La Nouvelle Heloise_, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and
freed it from convention!

It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the
one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what h