In another place: 'He went out and gloated over the great scene of immeasurable Nature. Orion and the Pleiades moved over his head, the dear moon was opposite. Looking intently into her friendly face, he greeted her repeatedly: "Moon, Moon, friend of my thoughts; hurry not away, dear Moon, but stay. What is thy name? Laura, Cynthia, Cyllene? Or shall I call thee beautiful Betty of the Sky?" ... He loved country walks; we made for lonely places, dark fearsome thickets, lonely unfrequented paths, scrambled up all the hills, spied out every bit of Nature, came to rest at last under a shady rock ... Klopstock's life is one constant enjoyment. He gives himself up to feeling, and revels in Nature's feast ... Winter is his favourite time of year....[11] He preaches skating with the unction of a missionary to the heathen, and not without working miracles, ... the ice by moonlight is a feast of the Gods to him ... only one rule, we do not leave the river till the moon has gone.' Klopstock described this in his _Skating_: O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn Drives glowing now, and now restrains, On city hearths let faggots burn, But come with me to crystal plains. The scene is filled with vapouring light, As when the winter morning's prime Looks on the lake. Above it night Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime. How still and white is all around! How rings the track with new sparr'd frost! Far off the metal's cymbal sound Betrays thee, for a moment lost ... Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg: It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is always trying to find them in his walks. This illustrates the lines in _Stintenburg_: Isle of pious solitude, Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc. but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry. He wrote of Soroe,[12] one of the loveliest places in the Island of Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant place'; where 'By a sacred tree, on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island ... Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the tree-tops.' The day on which he composed _The Lake of Zurich_ was one of the pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and still tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.'