ng distresses me more than to see men torment each other;
particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season
of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in
quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is
too late to repair it.

To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by
German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no
_role_ at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's
truest and most intimate friend.

Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way,
with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story
proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly
original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although
he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and
thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that
preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a
brilliant youth.

Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the
'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which
he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination
of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,'
the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was
absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not
draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at
that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with
feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own
breast.

When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the
meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable
foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the
inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by
the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand
unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of
the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the
countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I
feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image,
and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains
us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my
friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth
seem t