Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good?
Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks?
Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed?
Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;
Youth, thou art here,
Strong as a god,
Free as a god,
Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below,
The wavering lustre of the silent sea,
Now softly silvered by the swimming moon,
Now rosy golden in the western beam;
Youth, what is silken rest,
And what the smiling of the friendly moon,
Or gold or purple of the evening sun,
To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds?
Here thou canst wildly stream
As bids thy heart;
Below are masters, ever-changeful minds,
Or the dead stillness of the servile main.
Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;
Youth, thou art here,
Strong as a god,
Free as a god.

Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and
grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of
idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic
mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for
Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a
bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day.