onfounded
together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake
which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone
forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous
torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand
impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and
delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss,
and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the
intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a
plunge into that gulf.

To his farewell letter he adds:

Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your
lover, draws near his end.

The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and
sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in
loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of _Faust_,
when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos:

How all things live and work, and ever blending,
Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range!
How powers celestial, rising and descending,
Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange.
Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing.

And the Earth spirit says:

In the currents of life, in action's storm,
I float and I wave
With billowy motion,--
Birth and the grave
A limitless ocean.

Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said:

Inscrutable in broadest light,
To be unveiled by force she doth refuse.

But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness:

Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now
For the last time upon my troubled brow!

and

Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills
In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow,
Hope's budding promise every valley fills.
And winter, spent with age, and powerless now,
Draws off his forces to the savage hills.

and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of longing:

In the rich sunset see how brightly glow
Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green.
Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more;
Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light.
Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar,
And after, ever after him to strive!
Then should I see the world outspread below,
Illumined by the deathless evening bea