Klopstock described
this in his _Skating_:

O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn
Drives glowing now, and now restrains,
On city hearths let faggots burn,
But come with me to crystal plains.
The scene is filled with vapouring light,
As when the winter morning's prime
Looks on the lake. Above it night
Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime.
How still and white is all around!
How rings the track with new sparr'd frost!
Far off the metal's cymbal sound
Betrays thee, for a moment lost ...

Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count
Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg:

It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of
Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom,
and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre,
which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is
always trying to find them in his walks.

This illustrates the lines in _Stintenburg_:

Isle of pious solitude,
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,
Or--hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew--
Come on the roseate