From Goethe, Roman Elegies:

Number 5 ("Now on Classical Soil I Stand")

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) blended poetics of nature and aesthetics.  His twenty Roman Elegies (1788) describe architecture and imagery of Rome, which is presented as an analogy to the present:  "As so we are like you, o Roman victors."  Other themes found in the elegies are self-consciousness, ambivalence, irony, physical love, and time:  "In the heroic age when gods and goddesses loved, desire followed the glance, and enjoyment followed desire."  In the final ode, the twentieth, the main theme is the secret, the idea that the poem always leaves some things unsaid.  The versification form used in this collection is the elegiac distich, that is, alternating hexameters and pentameters.