It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.
He sums up the impressions made on him with:
The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.
The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, was Iphigenia.
Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific observer.
He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the things what actually was not there.'
He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily.
The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this change, which led him, as he said in his Treatise on Granite,
from observation and description of the human heart, that part of creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible.
The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and Palermo I have had many changes.'