In the following study I propose to reconstruct the many-layered Occidental background for a German word: the concept of world harmony which underlies the word Stimmung. This task implies a survey of the whole semantic “field”, as it was developed in different epochs and literatures: the concept and the words expressing it had to be brought face to face, and in the words, in turn, the semantic kernel and the emotional connotations with their variations and fluctuations in time had to be considered. A “Stimmungsgeschichte” of the word Stimmung was necessary. I hope that this historical development will spontaneously, if gradually, emerge from the mosaic of texts to which I wished my running text to be subordinated: the consistency of the texture of verbal and conceptual associations and motifs through the centuries seems to me to be herewith established. “Avez-vous un texte?” was the insistent question which the famous positivist Fustel de Coulanges was wont to address to his pupils when they made a historical statement. The student in historical semantics must ask: “Have you many texts?”, for only with a great number of them is one enabled to visualize their ever-recurrent pattern. I realize that the medieval art of tapestry (which Péguy has revived in literature), with its possibility of showing a constant motif along with the labyrinth of interwoven ramifications, would be a more adequate medium of treatment than is the necessarily linear run of the words of language. And, in any case, I shall be obliged, in the notes, to anticipate or recapitulate the events which cannot be treated at their historical place.