Sharing thought with none,
Save one faithful friend, revealing
To his kindly ear
Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing,
Make the night so drear.
In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm:
This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars, which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring.
To the same year belongs The Fisher, which gave such melodious voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, 'the moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, The Erlking, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding.
Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year he went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.' His love for Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the Werther period, gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more temperate.
This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from Werther, and his mind was too agitated for quiet observation: