Love Quote by Karl Philipp Moritz

A sly compliment with a barb tucked inside, Moritz stages Prussia as the land of secondhand patriotism: poets praise the love of country as a cherished sentiment, but it stays safely literary, an ornament in verse. Then he pivots to the unnamed "here" (Moritz is typically writing as a fascinated German observer of England) where patriotism is not the property of poets at all but a mass emotion, felt by "no man" who doesn’t gush about it. The sentence is built like a travel writer's before-and-after, yet its real target is the social machinery that turns national feeling into a public performance.

The key word is "describe". Moritz isn’t only noting that people love their country; he’s describing a culture in which loving it must be narrated, repeatedly, with "rapture". That rapture reads as both admiration and suspicion. When everyone speaks the same ardor, sincerity becomes hard to measure, and patriotism starts to look less like affection than etiquette - a verbal badge of belonging.

Context matters: Moritz writes in the late Enlightenment, when "country" is shifting from dynastic loyalty toward a modern national identity, and Britain’s public sphere - coffeehouses, newspapers, parliamentary spectacle - offers constant stages for that identity. His contrast flatters British civic energy while quietly indicting it: a society that encourages loud love of country can also coerce it, rewarding the right enthusiasm and stigmatizing the wrong silence.