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This collection gathers lyrical, satirical, and occasional philosophical poems that move between intense personal feeling and broad speculative melancholy. The verses examine love, solitude, bodily frailty, death, and the consolations and disappointments of beauty, while also addressing patriotic yearning and classical learning. Formally diverse—odes, songs, satires, impassioned monologues, and fragments—the pieces alternate elegiac reflection with sharper irony and occasional lightness. Recurring images of nature and memory frame meditations on human limitation and yearning, producing an austere but richly allusive record of a highly sensitive, erudite voice confronting longing, loss, and the impossibility of lasting consolation.
Wandering from the parent bough, Little, trembling leaf, Whither goest thou? “From the beech, where I was born, By the north wind was I torn. Him I follow in his flight, Over mountain, over vale, From the forest to the plain, Up the hill, and down again. With him ever on the way: More than that, I cannot say. Where I go, must all things go, Gentle, simple, high and low: Leaves of laurel, leaves of rose; Whither, heaven only knows!”