"For a week the author of 'To the Moon' rose in the middle of the night and from the silent meadows of the Ilm observed that 'so significant object' through a seven-foot telescope made by a local craftsman. 'There was a time when people wanted the emotion of the moon, now they want the sight of it', he later said to Schiller, who acutely remarked on the uncanny tangibility in the telescope of an image that otherwise seemed purely and unapproachably visual. The mystery of Nature only receded, however, it did not vanish."
-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 641.
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