Travel is brought home to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and
hamlet that tempts us in the distance. SEHNSUCHT - the passion for
what is ever beyond - is livingly expressed in that white riband of
possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman
following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any
cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness
and attainability by this wavering line of junction. There is a
passionate paragraph in WERTHER that strikes the very key. 'When I
came hither,' he writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on
every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top! There the
wood - ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain
summits - ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! Oh to lose
myself among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came
back without finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like
the future. A vast whole lies in the twilight before our spirit;
sight and feeling alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect,
and we yearn to surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full
with all the rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when
we hasten to the fruition, when THERE is changed to HERE, all is
afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped
estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.
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