Heinrich von Kleist, “Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape,” Berlin Abendblätter, Oct. 13, 1810 (Art Journal, Spring 1974, P. Miller, p. 208):
“A magnificent thing it is, in infinite solitude by the sea, under a sullen sky, to gaze off into a boundless watery waste....and so I myself became the Capuchin monk, the picture became the dune, but that across which I should have looked with longing, the sea, was absent completely. Nothing could be sadder or more discomfited than just this position in the world: the single spark of life in the vast realms of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle. The picture with its two or three mysterious objects lies before one like the Apocalypse, as though it were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts, and since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no foreground but the frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off....I am convinced that, through his powers, a square mile of Prussian sand, with a barberry bush and a crow beruffled forlornly in it, would have the effect of an Ossian or a Kosegarten. Yes, were such a painting made with its own chalk and water, the foxes and wolves, I believe, would be set howling by it, which is doubtless the strongest praise one could lavish on this kind of landscape...”
Wilhelm Wackenroder, Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk, 1797:
“But I know of two miraculous languages through which the Creator has enabled men to grasp and understand heavenly things in all their power, or at least so much of them — to put it more modestly — as mortals can grasp. They enter into us by ways other than words, they move us suddenly, miraculously, seizing our entire self, penetrating into our very nerve and drop of blood. One of these miraculous languages is spoken only by God, the other is spoken by a few chosen men whom he has lovingly annointed. They are: Nature and Art..... Art is a language unlike that of Nature; but Art, too, has a marvelous power over the human heart and exercises it by equally hidden means. It speaks through the image of men, which is to say that it uses hieroglyphic signs which are familiar and comprehensible to us by their appearance. But it endows these visible forms with something spiritual and supersensual in a way so affecting, so admirable that it can stir us to tthe roots of our being.....The teachings of learned men exercise our brain, only half of our self. But the two miraculous languages whose power I proclaim touch our feelings as well as our mind; they seem to fuse — I cannot find other words to express it — all parts of our unconscious being into a new, single organ which receives and comprehends in this twofold way the miracles of Heaven....”