Arising from religiously motivated empathy, it expanded to the other perceptions—for example, sensual love was no longer understood as a destructive passion (Vanitas) but rather as a basis of social institutions, as it was for Antoine Houdar de la Motte.
Around the middle of the century, sentimentalism set "untouched" nature against (courtly) civilization, as in the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In addition, Samuel Richardson's sentimental epistolary novel "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" (1740) had great literary influence.
The sensitive style (German: empfindsamer Stil) of music, developed in Germany, aimed to express "true and natural" feelings, in contrast to the baroque.
The origin of sentimentalism in this context was chiefly religious, with the emotionally coloured keyboard music and lieder of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach being typical examples.
The musician and publisher Johann Christoph Bode translated Laurence Sterne's novel, A sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, into German in 1768 under the title Yoriks empfindsame Reise.
German poets who verged on sentimentalism were Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) and Sophie de La Roche (1730–1807, the author of the first epistolary novel in German) and its influence may also be seen in Goethe's early work Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), a high-point of Sturm und Drang.
[4] Religious sentimentalism has often been considered as inspiration for François-René de Chateaubriand and his creation of Romanticism, which was another literary genre that emerged late in the eighteenth century.
In popular literature, Empfindsamkeit was a common genre that continued into the nineteenth century, and was found in serialised novels in periodicals such as Gartenlaube.