There is something ritualistic about regret; it continually rehearses the past, as if to extract some final compensation from remembrance. This is especially true in old age and Reinhard, the elderly protagonist of Theodor Storm’s great novella “The Lake of the Bees,” is one such dogged ritualist. Every evening, after his walk in the country, he sits in his unlit study as the sun sets and the moon begins to rise. He has ordered his housekeeper not to light the lamps. As he waits a pale sliver of moonlight moves slowly along the wall. At last it slants across a small portrait, which it illumines briefly and Reinhard, utters the name “Elizabeth!” Regret has begun its nightly ritual.

The story that ensues might have been mawkishly sentimental, another hackneyed saga of lost love. Instead, it unfolds as a kind of fairy tale but one with hard, clear edges to it. Storm wrote the story when he was barely 20, and it is astonishing how convincingly he captures an old man’s idealized image of the past, without the least trace of irony. At the same time, he delivers a tacit rebuke to nostalgia.

“The Lake of the Bees” is one of the masterpieces of 19th-century German fiction that has remained pretty much unknown to American readers. It now has appeared in a new translation by Jonathan Katz (Hesperus, 86 pages, $12.95) together with “A Quiet Musician,” another of Theodor Storm’s classic tales. Each work is piercingly sad, but the sadness is seen from a deliberate distance, and this very coolness that gives both stories their peculiar force.

Storm himself was one of the most influential and popular of a remarkable generation of German-language writers, most of whom were equally accomplished poets as well as novelists. This included the Swiss Gottfried Keller, the Austrian Adalbert Stifter, and Storm’s own compatriot, Theodor Fontane. Whatever their differences, all these authors combined an intense interest in folktales and regional lore with a stubborn devotion to realism. Their distinctive mix of the fabulous and the gritty gives their work an odd dissonance that undercuts, even as it enhances, their surface calm. Like his colleagues Storm possesses a quality as a novelist that is difficult to pin down, though instantly recognizable: a sense of the spaciousness of life, of an individual destiny with vast ramifications, punctuated by sudden moments of decision that have the effect of narrowing that life irrevocably.

Storm was born in 1817 in northern Germany. His childhood was unusual for that time; as he put it later, “not once did I hear a word about religion or Christianity.” This irreligious upbringing, coupled with a career in the law and a rather turbulent involvement in politics, seems to have afforded him a certain dry-eyed equanimity. Despite his very active public life, he was amazingly prolific as an author with more than 50 novels to his credit and several volumes of verse. As it turns out, “The Lake of the Bees,” which first appeared in 1849, drew its inspiration from Storm’s own unhappy passion for a woman whom he first had to renounce and only later, after some 20 years, was able to marry.

No such happy ending befalls Reinhard, the dreamy protagonist of “The Lake of the Bees.” He first falls in love with Elizabeth when he is 10 and she a mere child of 5.The story of their childhood bond, which leads Reinhard to believe that they will remain together forever, is beautifully told as a kind of marchen, or fairy tale, worthy of the Brothers Grimm; only the evil witch is lacking. This is a golden childhood, but the subtle fact that it is being recounted through the obsessive recollections of an aging man keeps us from according it complete credence.

To Reinhard, Elizabeth is not only a beautiful child, and then a young woman, whom he loves, but a breathing embodiment of some unattainable ideal, symbolized for him by the white water lily. As we follow the narration from one idyllic scene to another, we begin to realize – though Reinhard does not, even in retrospect – that his love is impossible. It is not that Elizabeth remains unattainable but that he himself has set her upon some unreachable pedestal of the ideal. A decisive moment arises when all might have become possible, but Reinhard dithers; he writes poems to the ideal Elizabeth and keeps them in a little album, but during a two-year absence, he neglects to write a single letter to Elizabeth herself.

The denouement, and the moral center, of the tale occurs in a beautiful and rather scary passage. Reinhard, ever the eager botanist, spots a white water lily at night on the Lake of the Bees where Elizabeth, now married to his best friend, lives. He swims out to collect it:

He swam out slowly, raising his arms from the water from time to time, letting the droplets sparkle in the moonlight. Yet it was as if the distance between him and the flower remained unchanged, except that the bank, when he looked round, was in deeper and deeper haze. But he did not give up; he swam boldly on in the same direction. In the end he had come so close to the flower that he could distinguish the silvery leaves clearly in the moonlight. But at that moment he felt suddenly as if he were entangled in a net; the slippery tendrils of the plants reached up and twined themselves around his naked limbs. The unfamiliar waters around him were so dark.

Reinhard frees himself from the entangling roots and regains the shore, but we know without being told that those unseen roots and clutching tendrils represent all that lies beneath the pristine unapproachability of the drifting flower – life as it is lived, with its clinging responsibilities and daily encumbering commitments – and he retreats from it in dread. The sadness of the story lies not in love lost but in love missed. Reinhard, unlike his creator, remains to the end a man paralyzed by the dark roots of the ideal.