Immensee

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.

Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm (1817 - 1888), commonly known as Theodor Storm, was a German writer. Storm was one of the most important authors of 19th-century German Literary realism. He wrote a number of stories, poems and novellas. His two best-known works are the novellas Immensee (1849) and Der Schimmelreiter ("The Rider on the White Horse"), first published in April 1888 in the Deutsche Rundschau. Other published works include a volume of his poems (1852), the novella Pole Poppenspäler (1874) and the novella Aquis submersus (1877).