Such was this scenery in the eyes of an ordinary, sober-minded traveller. The Romanticist who was my companion seemed to me to be less moved by the spectacle than I was; at least he said very little about it during the course of the day. But when, towards night, we were making our way down the mountain, his imagination was suddenly fired. It was quite dark, and the darkness acted upon his nerves. It seemed to him as if more and more of the spirits of nature came forth, the darker it grew. And when, in the distance, we saw the first points of light coming from the windows of houses on the mountain side, houses which we could not distinguish on account of the darkness, he had the feeling that these windows must be in the rock itself, and that we could see in if we were only near enough. The illuminated panes were to him great eyes, with which the spirit of the mountain looked out at us; he felt as if the wooded hillside were watching us. He was in a weird, eccentric, genuinely Romantic mood, and I could not follow him. But on this occasion I had the opportunity of learning by personal observation how a German Romanticist of the good old days viewed nature; how it was not until night that it really became nature to him; how he did not look at it, but to one side of it or behind it; and by observing how much more, and yet how much less, my companion felt face to face with nature than I did, I arrived at an understanding of the legitimacy and the narrowness, the unnaturalness and the poetry of the Romantic conception of nature.[8]
[1] Köpke: Ludwig Tieck, i. 139.
[2]
"Capricious Phantasus,
A strange old man,
Follows his foolish, wayward bent;
But now they have fettered him,
That he may cease from his trickery,
No longer confuse reasonable thought,
Nor lead poor man astray."
[3] Sepp: Görres und seine Zeit, 89, 90.
[4] Briefwechsel zwischen Gentz und Adam Müller, 48.
[5] "Nature has neither kernel nor shell, she is everything at one and the same time."
[6] Köpke, i. 139, 163.
[7] "Beyond the lake there's a glittering and flaming; the mountain-tops are tipped with gold; gravely the bushes rustle and bend, and lay their twinkling green heads together. Wave, art thou rolling to us the reflection of the round, friendly face of the moon? The trees recognise it, and joyfully stretch forth their branches towards the magic light. The spirits begin to dance on the waves; the flowers of the night unfold their petals with melodious sound; where the leaves are thickest the nightingale awakes and tells her dream; her notes flow forth like clear, dazzling beams, to greet the echo on the mountain side."
[8] The above is a faithful account of the effect produced by this scenery upon the Danish poet M. Goldschmidt in the autumn of 1872.