Dedicated "to all noble souls", and clearly imitating Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, the novel tells two parallel love stories, one happy, the other sad (as foretold by a gypsy woman at the beginning of Part Two).
A man from Oettingen in Bayern named Xaver Siegwart, the youngest of five siblings, has grown up on the banks of the Danube after the early death of his mother.
Restless and active as a boy, excited at the idea of becoming a hunter like his father, he becomes an impressionable youth, in love with silence and the natural world.
After walking through a beautiful wood, they arrive just as the sun is setting among the oaks, and the impressions made by the play of light on wet cobwebs, the sounds of the bells, and the saintliness of the monks, lead him to religion.
Four years later he encounters her by accident and recognizes her as his Mariane — but she is at the point of death, and soon afterwards he dies also of grief, found sprawled in the moonlight at her grave.