Read this description of a romantic landscape taken from Novalis's _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_: "From a height they looked down upon a romantic country, strewn with towns and castles, with temples and tombs, a country which united the gentle charms of inhabited plains with the terrible charms of deserts and precipitous mountains. The most beautiful colours were happily blended. Mountain peaks gleamed like fireworks in their coverings of ice and snow. The smiling plain was clothed in the freshest of green. The distance decked itself in every shade of blue, and the deep blue of the sea threw into relief the innumerable bright pennons waving from the masts of numerous fleets. In the background we could see a shipwreck, in the foreground a merry country feast; far off the terribly beautiful eruption of a volcano and the desolation wrought by an earthquake, and near at hand a pair of lovers exchanging the sweetest caresses under sheltering trees. On one side of this scene a frightful battle was raging, and at no great distance from the battle was to be seen a theatre with a ludicrous play going on. Upon the other side, in the foreground, the corpse of a young girl lay upon a bier, with an inconsolable lover and weeping parents kneeling by its side; in the background sat a sweet mother with her child at her breast, angels nestling at her feet, and peeping through the branches above her head." What a pot-pourri! And over it all is shed the indispensable pale, yellow light of that friend and well-wisher, protector and betrayer of lovers, that supreme comforter and divinity of the Romanticists--the man in the moon. He is their salvation. His round face and his profile have exactly the degree of distinctness permissible or possible in a Romantic countenance. All the knights of Romanticism wear his yellow livery. And a truer knight of the moon than Franz Sternbald is not to be found. "I would," he says, "that I could fill the whole world with my song of love, that I could move the moonlight and the rosy dawn, so that they should echo my grief and happiness, until trees, branches, leaves, and grass all took up the melody, repeating it as with millions of tongues." Hereupon he sings a "moonlight song": "Hinter'm Wasser wie flimmernde Flammen, Berggipfel oben mit Gold beschienen, Neigen rauschend und ernst die grünen Gebüsche die blinkenden Häupter zusammen. Welle, rollst du herauf den Schein, Des Mondes rund freundlich Angesicht? Es merkt's und freundlich bewegt sich der Hain, Streckt die Zweig' entgegen dem Zauberlicht. Fangen die Geister an auf den Fluthen zu springen, Thun sich die Nachtblumen auf mit Klingen, Wacht die Nachtigall im dicksten Baum, Verkündigt dichterisch ihren Traum. Wie helle, blendende Strahlen die Töne nieder fliessen, Am Bergeshang den Wiederhall zu grüssen."[7]