ant mountains and discovered
a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon
me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to
distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with
tears.

Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to
be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of
all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me
with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a
crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings
were as shadows.

'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:

I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move
moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees,
twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my
music with a thousand tongues.[20]

To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed
to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music.
'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and
starlight, were in all their songs.

There is a background of landscape all through _Franz Sternbald's
Wanderings_.

In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place;
Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an
extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he
only wanted to fill up the page.

Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her _Freundschaftlichen
Frauenzimmerbriefen_, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills,
vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and
feeling; and most of all, Goethe in _Werther_ tunes scenery and soul
to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery.
Jean Paul, like Tieck in _Franz Sternbald_, never spares us one
sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very
telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day:

Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in
waves along them.

The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the
darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the
smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming
into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved
him to a wistful compassion for himself.

As Franz wanders about the wood:

He observes the trees