Off into the wood they went, on and on; on through moist shady glens, where everything was so peaceful, except for the cry of the falcon flying unseen in the heavens far above their heads; on again through the thick brushwood, so thick that Reinhard must needs go on ahead to make a track, here snapping off a branch, there bending aside a trailing vine. But ere long he heard Elisabeth behind him calling out his name. He turned round.
"Reinhard!" she called, "do wait for me! Reinhard!"
Reinhard and Elizabeth have grown together -- as children in their make-believe home in the fields, where they share fairy-stories; and as youths in the woodlands, where they go in search of strawberries. Yet he is the older of the two, and must go abroad to further his schooling: and with him he takes a book of poems he has been writing. They are songs of his youth, and of love, that he dares not show her.
Theodor Woldsen Storm (1817-1888) in 1852 published both a collection of poems entitled Gedichte and the "nouvelle" Immensee, a deeply lyrical meditation upon the author's past and family home, firmly establishing his place in the German and international literary worlds.