Hyperion

A young American, grieving, wanders through Germany reading, talking and falling in love — the Rhine, Heidelberg, a Swiss inn, a great deal of Jean Paul and Goethe. Longfellow was the most popular poet America ever had, recited by schoolchildren on two continents; this 1839 romance is barely a novel and frankly autobiographical, and it introduced German Romanticism to a country that had never heard of it.