It was once said against me that I fashion only small things, and that my people are always ordinary people. If that is true, I am now in the position of offering readers something smaller and more insignificant still, namely an assortment of fancies for young hearts. Nor are they even meant to preach virtue and morals, as the custom is, but rather to work solely by what they are. If there is anything noble and good in me, it will exist in my writings on its own; but if it is not in my nature, I will strive in vain to depict the sublime and the beautiful, for baseness and ignobility will always show through. Fashioning great or small things was never the aim of my writings; I was guided by other laws entirely. Art is so high and exalted for me; for me, as I have said elsewhere, it is the highest thing on earth after religion, and so I have never regarded my writings as poetical, nor few shall I presume to regard them so. The world has poets, who are the high priests, the benefactors of humanity; but it has a great many false prophets. Yet if not all spoken words can be poetry, they may be something else whose existence is not utterly unjustified. To give kindred spirits an hour of pleasure, to send forth greetings to all of them known or unknown, and add a grain of good to the edifice of the eternal, that was my writings’ aim, and that it shall remain. I would be very glad to know for certain that I had achieved even this aim alone. But so long as we are speaking of great and small things, I shall put forth my views, which are likely to differ from those of many people. The wafting of the air, the trickling of the water, the growing of the grain, the surging of the sea, the budding of the earth, the shining of the sky, the glimmering of the stars is what I deem great; the thunderstorm that looms in splendor, the lightning that cleaves houses, the storm that drives the breakers, the firespewing mountain, the earthquake that buries whole lands, these I do not deem greater than those first phenomena, indeed I deem them smaller, for they are the mere effects of much higher laws.  –Adalbert Stifter ‘Motley Stones’