Hasten thee, Kronos!...
Over stock and stone let thy trot
Into life straightway lead....
Wide, high, glorious the view
Gazing round upon life,
While from mount unto mount
Hovers the spirit eterne,
Life eternal foreboding....
Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in 1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye could not grasp it.'
He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, and these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, and were partly mixed with them.