Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc.
but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry.
He wrote of Soroe,[[12]] one of the loveliest places in the Island of Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant place'; where 'By a sacred tree, on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island ... Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the tree-tops.'
The day on which he composed The Lake of Zurich was one of the pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and still tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.'
But, unlike St Preux, he 'seemed less impressed by our scenery than by the beauty of our girls,[[13]] and his letters bear out the remark.[[14]] Yet delight in Nature was always with him: Klopstock's lofty morality pours forth all through it. Nature, love, fame, wine, everything is looked at from an ennobling point of view.'
Fair is the majesty of all thy works
On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair!
But fairer the glad face
Enraptured with their view.
Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake,