o dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a
beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could
describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all
that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the
mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite
God!

O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under
the weight of the grandeur of these visions.

Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of
it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling
into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something
immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he
said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and
she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery
delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees.

When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my
own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for
my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during
the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen,
fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up....
Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness
than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can
imitate without affectation.

With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased;
on July 24th he wrote:

I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down
to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass.

Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature
a tormentor:

_August_ 18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our
happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and
ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature,
overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all
paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a
demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone
days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the
river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all
nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot
to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their
varied windings shaded with the lo