Thus the sons of earth now drink in The fire of heaven without danger. And it is our duty, poets, to stand Bare-headed under the storms of God, Grasp… - Friedrich Hölderlin

When brother fled from brother, when lovers passed
Each other by in ignorance, when fathers failed
To recognize their sons, when human words no more Were understood, nor human laws, that was when
The meaning of it all assailed me and I trembled:
It was my nation’s parting god!

To be one with all – that is the life of the divinity, that is the heaven of man.

"Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment — an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness."