oa ‘Houdt ons voor geen sentimenteele knapen!’ - Natuur en emoties in Brieven, geschreven op eene wandeling door een gedeelte van Duitschland en Holland, in den zomer van 1809

the six authors – all students or recent graduates – had made a walking tour of several weeks through the German countries. Their search for the beauties of nature explains their preference for the walking stick over the horse carriage. The travel report offers an emotional description of nature and landscape. Following historians of the ‘emotional turn’ in the belief that emotions are – at least in part – social and cultural constructions, I reconstruct the ‘cultural requirements’ of this intense and often physical experience of nature. I argue that emotional depictions in the travel report are closely connected to the contemporary ideal of Bildung, of which ‘emotional refinement’ was an important component. Knowledge of contemporary poetry, literature, painting, and aesthetics was an absolute precondition for the proper emotional experience of nature, at least for the elitist ‘emotional community’ to which the travelling students belonged.