True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in 'God's dear world' that he took the greatest pleasure. He could not have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small. 'By God's mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore we praise and thank Him. In His creatures we see the power of His word—how great it is. In a peach stone, too, for hard as the shell is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right time.'[6] Again, 'So God is present in all creatures, even the smallest leaves and poppy seeds.'

All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the fatherly goodness of God. He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor Brneck:

I have lately seen two wonderful things: the first, looking from the window at the stars and God's whole beautiful sky dome, I saw never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is still firm in its place. Now, there are some who search for such pillars and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and because they cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would certainly fall ... the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep over our heads, so heavy that they might be compared to a great sea, and yet I saw no ground on which they rested, and no vats in which they were contained, yet they did not fall on us, but greeted us with a frown and flew away. When they had gone, the rainbow lighted both the ground and the roof which had held them.

Luther often used very forcible images from Nature. 'It is only for the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when our summer comes, our grain will spring up—rain, sun, and wind prepare us for it—that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy Ghost.'

His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms: 'There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and beautiful gardens—nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy thoughts of God and His goodness are the lovely flowers.'

His description of heaven for his little son John is full of simple reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and mystical speculation as to God's relation to His universe; and Protestant divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of rationalism and pietism.

Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while a like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to wood, tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin.

There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower Rhine,[7] which suggests the poems of the eighth and ninth centuries, about a great quarrel between Spring, crowned with flowers, and hoary-headed Winter, in which one praises and the other blames the cuckoo for announcing Spring.

In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter, then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are called his vassals, etc.

There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer:

When that the breezes blow in May, And snow melts from the wood away, Blue violets lift their heads on high, And when the little wood-birds sing, And flow'rets from the ground up-spring, Then everybody's glad.

Others complaining of Winter, who must have leave of absence, and the wrongs it has wrought are poured out to Summer. The little birds are very human; the owlet complains:

Poor little owlet me! I have to fly all alone through the wood to-night; The branch I want to perch on is broken, The leaves are all faded, My heart is full of grief.

The cuckoo is either praised for bringing good news, or made fun of as the 'Gutzgauch.'

A cuckoo will fly to his heart's treasure, etc.

The fable songs[8] of animal weddings are full of humour. The fox makes arrangements for his wedding: 'Up with you now, little birds! I am going to take a bride. The starling shall saddle the horses, for he has a grey mantle; the beaver with the cap of marten fur must be driver, the hare with his light foot shall be outrider; the nightingale with his clear voice shall sing the songs, the magpie with his steady hop must lead the dances,' etc.

The nightingale, with her rich tones, is beloved and honoured before all the winged things; she is called 'the very dear nightingale,' and addressed as a lady.

'Thou art a little woodbird, and flyest in and out the green wood; fair Nightingale, thou little woodbird, thou shalt be my messenger.'

It is she who warns the girl against false love, or is the silent witness of caresses.

There were a great many wishing songs: 'Were I a little bird and had two wings, I would fly to thee,' or 'Were I a wild falcon, I would take flight and fly down before a rich citizen's house—a little maid is there,' etc. 'And were my love a brooklet cold, and sprang out of a stone, little should I grieve if I were but a green wood; green is the wood, the brooklet is cold, my love is shapely.' The betrayed maiden cries: 'Would God I were a white swan! I would fly away over mountain and deep valley o'er the wide sea, so that my father and mother should not know where I was.'

Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the flowers of love. 'Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be gathered,' was a common saying; and 'Gather roses by night, for then all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.' 'The roses are ready to be gathered, so gather them to-day. He who does not gather in summer, will not gather in winter.' There is tenderness in this: 'I only know a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green meadow, 'tis called forget-me-not.'

These are sadder:

There is a lime tree in this valley, O God! what does it there? It will help me to grieve That I have no lover.

'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till my death.'

Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9] where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10]

Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death.

We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther:

'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their pasture lands and pastor....'

Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in Glueckhaft Schiff, shews little feeling for Nature; but in Simplicissimus, on the other hand, that monument of literature which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the Thirty Years' War.

When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at midnight, he heard the old man sing:

Come, nightingale, comfort of the night, Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator, While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!... The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God.... My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods.

Simplicissimus goes on: 'During this song, methinks, it was as if nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.'

What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during the latter half of the seventeenth century? In Italy and Spain it had assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically mystical; Shakespeare's plays had brought sympathy to maturity in England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine. But the idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and artificiality, the hatching of empty effect.

The aberrations of taste which found expression in the periwig style of Louis XIV., and in the pigtails of the eighteenth century, affected the feeling for Nature too. The histories of taste in general, and of feeling for Nature, have this in common, that their line of progress is not uniformly straightforward, but liable to zigzags. This is best seen in reviewing the different civilized races together. Moreover, new ideas, however forcible and original, even epoch-making, do not win acceptance at once, but rather trickle slowly through resisting layers; it is long before any new gain in culture becomes the common property of the educated, and hence opposite extremes are often found side by side—taste for what is natural with taste for what is artificial. Garden style is always a delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we respect her ways or wish to impose our own. The impulse towards the modern French gardening came from Italy. Ancient and modern times both had to do with it. At the Renaissance there was a return to Pliny's style,[11] which the Cinque cento gardens copied. In this style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, and marble statues placed against them, 'to break the uniformity of the dark green with pleasant silhouettes. One looks almost in vain for flowers and turf; even trees were exiled to a special wilderness at the edge of the garden; but the great ornament of the whole was never missing, the wide view over sunny plains and dome-capt towns, or over the distant shimmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in classic days.'[12]

The old French garden as Maitre Lenotre laid it out in Louis XIV.'s time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was architectural in design, and directly connected, like Pliny's, with various parts of the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. Every part of it—from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace, designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains—belonged to one symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the house, standing free from trees, and visible from every point. Farther off, radiating avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite object—obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of bowers, giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. Artifice was the governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not speak but only supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this taste and this art. Hills and woods were only hindrances; the straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and "cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the landscape eye of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt artificialities.'[13]

Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will; they were cut into cubes, balls, pyramids, even into shapes of animals, as the gardener's fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge. Of such a garden one could say with honest Claudius, ''Tis but a tailor's joke, and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great heart of Nature.'

It was Nature in bondage: 'green architecture,' with all its parts, walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and theatres with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats and hair in towers, played at private theatricals.

Where water was available, water devices were added. And in the midst of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced: the story of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and Atalanta in another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the walls and niches. And the people were like their gardens both in dress and manners; imposing style was everything.

Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV. The great periwig shrivelled to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of Lenotre's grandezza.

'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and people were unnatural and affected—mere inventions to suit the gallant fetes. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's rosy-blue landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. His world had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of the idyllic—witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's brightest pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path—the path it was to follow with such increased fervour.

German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not spontaneous. Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together. Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his poetry. His words to a mountain:

'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the inference that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense. He took warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles, mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and his Spring Song, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace's Beatus ille was his model for Zlatna), has this conventional contrast between his heart and Nature.

'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously, grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.'

There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this:

'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell to you!

'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!'

But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.

There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as Montreux, Schaferei von der schoenen Juliana, since 1595; Urfe's Astree and Montemayor's Diana appeared in 1619, and Sidney's Arcadia ten years later.

Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as Daphne, Galatea, Corydon, and Asteria, his Schaferei von der 'Nymphen Hercinie.'

His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn began to shew herself and everything with her....

'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort me.'

He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, river, and spring.'

Fleming too, who already stood much higher as a lyrist and had travelled widely, lacked the power of describing scenery, and must needs call Oreads, Dryads, Castor and Pollux to his aid. He rarely reached the simple purity of his fine sonnet An Sich, or the feeling in this: 'Dense wild wood, where even the Titan's brightest rays give no light, pity my sufferings. In my sick soul 'tis as dark as in thy black hollow.'

In this time of decline the hymns of the Evangelical Church (to which Fleming contributed) were full of feeling, and brought the national songs to mind as nothing else did.

A few lines of Paul Gerhardt's seem to me to out-weigh whole volumes of contemporary rhymes—lines of such beauty as the Evening Song:

Now all the woods are sleeping, And night and stillness creeping O'er field and city, man and beast; The last faint beam is going, The golden stars are glowing In yonder dark-blue deep.

And after him, and more like him than any one else, came Andreas Gryphius.

There was much rhyming about Nature in the poet schools of Hamburg, Koenigsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an idle tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with high-flown titles, as in Philipp von Zesen's Pleasure of Spring, and Poetic Valley of Roses and Lilies.

'Up, my thoughts, be glad of heart, in this joyous pleasant March; ah! see spring is reviving, earth opens her treasury,' etc.

His romances were more noteworthy if not more interesting. He certainly aimed high, striving for simplicity and clearness of expressions in opposition to the Silesian poets, and hating foreign words.

His feeling for Nature was clear; he loved to take his reader into the garden, and was enthusiastic about cool shady walks, beds of tulips, birds' songs, and echoes. Idyllic pastoral life was the fashion—people of distinction gave themselves up to country life and wore shepherd costume—and he introduced a pastoral episode into his romance, Die adriatische Rosemund.[15]

Rosemund, whose father places arbitrary conditions in the way of her marriage with Markhold, becomes a shepherdess.

Not far off was a delightful spot where limes and alders made shade on hot summer days for the shepherds and shepherdesses who dwelt around. The shady trees, the meadows, and the streams which ran round it, and through it, made it look beautiful ... the celestial Rosemund had taken up her abode in a little shepherd hut on the slope of a little hill by a water-course, and shaded by some lime trees, in which the birds paid her homage morning and evening.... Such a place and such solitude refreshed the more than human Rosemund, and in such peace she was able to unravel her confused thoughts.

She thought continually of Markhold, and spent her time cutting his name in the trees. The following description of a walk with her sister Stillmuth and her lover Markhold, gives some idea of the formal affected style of the time.

The day was fine, the sky blue, the weather everywhere warm. The sun shone down on the globe with her pleasant lukewarm beams so pleasantly, that one scarcely cared to stay indoors. They went into the garden, where the roses had opened in the warmth of the sun, and first sat down by the stream, then went to the grottos, where Markhold particularly admired the shell decorations. When this charming party had had enough of both, they finally betook themselves to a leafy walk, where Rosemund introduced pleasant conversation on many topics. She talked first about the many colours of tulips, and remarked that even a painter could not produce a greater variety of tints nor finer pictures than these, etc.

In describing physical beauty, he used comparisons from Nature; for instance, in Simson[16]:

The sun at its brightest never shone so brightly as her two eyes ... no flower at its best can shew such red as blooms in the meadow of her cheeks, no civet rose is so milk-white, no lily so delicate and spotless, no snow fresh-fallen and untrodden is so white, as the heaven of her brows, the stronghold of her mind.

H. Anselm von Ziegler und Klipphausen also waxes eloquent in his famous Asiatischen Banise: 'The suns of her eyes played with lightnings; her curly hair, like waves round her head, was somewhat darker than white; her cheeks were a pleasant Paradise where rose and lily bloomed together in beauty—yea, love itself seemed to pasture there.' Elsewhere too this writer, so highly esteemed by the second Silesian school of poets, indulged in showy description and inflated rhetoric. Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel tried more elaborate descriptions of scenery; so that Chovelius says:

The Duke's German character shews pleasantly in his delight in Nature. The story often takes one into woods and fields; already griefs and cares were carried to the running brook and mossy stone, and happy lovers listened to the nightingale.

His language is barely intelligible, but there is a pleasant breadth about his drawing—for example, of the king's meadow and the grotto in Aramena:

Very cold crystal streams flowed through the fields and ran softly over the stony ground, making a pleasant murmur. Whilst the ear was thus contented, a distant landscape delighted the eye. No more delightful place, possessing all this at once, could have been found, etc.

Looking through the numerous air-holes, the eye lost itself in a deep valley, surrounded by nothing but mountains, where the shepherds tended their flocks, and one heard their flutes multiplied by the echo in the most delightful way.

Mawkish shepherd play is mixed here with such verses as (Rahel):

Thou, Chabras, thou art the dear stream, where Jacob's mouth gave me the first kiss. Thou, clear brook, often bearest away the passionate words of my son of Isaac ... on many a bit of wounded bark, the writing of my wounds is to be found.

The most insipid pastoral nonsense of the time was produced by the Nuremberg poets, the Pegnitz shepherds Klaj and Harsdoerfer. Their strength lay in imitating the sounds of Nature, and they were much admired. What is still more astonishing, Lohenstein's writings were the model for thirty years, and it was the fashion for any one who wrote more simply to apologize for being unable to reach the level of so great a master! To us the bombast, artificiality, and hidden sensuality of his poetry and Hoffmannswaldan's, are equally repulsive.

What dreary, manufactured stuff this is from Lohenstein's Praise of Roses sung by the Sun[17]:

This is the queen of flowers and plants, The bride of heaven, world's treasure, child of stars! For whom love sighs, and I myself, the sun, do pant, Because her crown is golden, and her leaves are velvet, Her foot and stylus emerald, her brilliance shames the ruby.

Other beings possess only single beauties, Nature has made the rose beautiful with all at once. She is ashamed, and blushes Because she sees all the other flowers stand ashamed before her.

In Rose Love he finds the reflection of love in everything:

In whom does not Love's spirit plant his flame? One sees the oil of love burn in the starry lamps, That pleasant light can nothing be but love, For which the dew from Phoebus' veil doth fall. Heaven loves the beauteous globe of earth, And gazes down on her by night with thousand eyes; While earth to please the heaven Doth clover, lilies, tulips in her green hair twine, The elm and vine stock intertwine, The ivy circles round the almond trees, And weeps salt tears when they are forced apart. And where the flowers burn with glow of Love, It is the rose that shews the brightest flame, For is the rose not of all flowers the queen, The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth?

Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, and feeling for Nature was entirely absent.



CHAPTER IX

SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE

It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[1]

The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not drive me away—grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with me—'tis your duty.'

Then the Spring greetings:

Now we go into the wide, wide world, With joy and delight we go; The woods are dressing, the meadows greening, The flowers beginning to blow. Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes, For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere.

And:

What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring From one place to another in sheer delight and glee; While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult around Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all?

This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is starting for the hunt in the early morning):

When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere, There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and cool. Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold, And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of praise, Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just awake Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost twigs, And it bends them down like children, like good children when they pray; And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green hair. O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know! One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold!

The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of Goethe's early work.

But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a few side streams which turned away from the main current of the great poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdoerfer's and Zesen's poetry about Nature.

But even by the side of Opitz and Fleming there was at least one poet of real feeling, Friedrich von Spee.[2] With all his mystic and pietist Christianity, he kept an open eye for Nature. His poems are full of disdain of the world and joy in Nature,[3] longings for death and lamentations over sin; he delighted in personifications of abstract ideas, childish playing with words and feelings, and sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and canting as he was apt to be, he often shewed a fine appreciation of detail. He was even—a rare thing then—fascinated by the sea.

Now rages and roars the wild, wild sea, Now in soft curves lies quietly; Sweetly the light of the sun's bright glow Mirrors itself in the water below.

Sad winter's past—the stork is here, Birds are singing and nests appear; Bowery homes steal into the day, Flow'rets present their full array; Like little snakes and woods about, The streams go wandering in and out.

His motives, like his diminutives, are constantly recurring. He uses many bold and poetic personifications; the sun 'combs her golden hair,' the moon is a good shepherd who leads his sheep the stars across the blue heath, blowing upon a soft pipe; the sun adorns herself in spring with a crown and a girdle of roses, fills her quiver with arrows, and sends her horses to gallop for miles across the smooth sky; the wind flies about, stopping for breath from time to time; shakes its wings and withdraws into its house when it is tired; the brook of Cedron sits, leaning on a bucket in a hollow, combing his bulrush hair, his shoulders covered by grass and water; he sings a cradle song to his little brooks, or drives them before him, etc.

But the most gifted poet of the set, and the most doughty opponent of Lohenstein's bombast, was the unhappy Christian Guenther.[4]

He vents his feelings in verse because he must. There is a foretaste of Goethe in his lyrics, poured put to free the soul from a burden, and melodious as if by accident. As we turn over the leaves of his book of songs, we find deep feeling for Nature mingled with his love and sorrows.[5]

Bethink you, flowers and trees and shades, Of the sweet evenings here with Flavia! 'Twas here her head upon my shoulder pressed; Conceal, ye limes, what else I dare not say. 'Twas here she clover threw and thyme at me, And here I filled her lap with freshest flowers. Ah! that was a good time! I care more for moon and starlight than the pleasantest of days, And with eyes and heart uplifted from my chamber often gaze With an awe that grows apace till it scarcely findeth space.

To his lady-love he writes:

Here where I am writing now 'Tis lonely, shady, cool, and green; And by the slender fig I hear The gentle wind blow towards Schweidnitz. And all the time most ardently I give it thousand kisses for thee.

And at Schweidnitz:

A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees, You know him well whose many rhymes And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen; Remember the joy of those fine summer nights.

To Eleanora:

Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude Between your alder rows, and think ... As in the oft-repeated lesson The young birds' cry shall bear my longing; And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for me.

In a time of despair, he wrote:

Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! Twist and split bark and twig, And break the tree of hope in two Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath.

Again:

The woods I'll wander through, From men I'll flee away, With lonely doves I'll coo, And with the wild things stay. When life's the prey of misery, And all my powers depart, A leafy grave will be Far kinder than thy heart.

True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and poetry melted away.'

Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets, H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject; but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest), a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England. The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year, Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms.

We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way.

G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in From the Floure and Leafe:

So was I with the song Thorow ravished, that till late and long Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ... And at the last, I gan full well aspie Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree On the further side, even right by me, That gave so passing a delicious smell According to the eglentere full well....

On the sote grass I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent, The birddes song was more convenient, And more pleasant to me by many fold Than meat or drink or any other thing.

Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love:

The rocks do not so cruelly Repulse the waves continually, As she my suit and affection So that I am past remedy.

Robert Southwell (1595), in Love's Servile Lott, compares love to April:

May never was the month for love, For May is full of floures, But rather Aprill, wett by kinde, For love is full of showers.... Like winter rose and summer yce, Her joyes are still untymelye; Before her hope, behind remorse, Fayre first, in fyne unseemely.

Edmund Spenser (1598) describes a garden in The Faerie Queene:

There the most daintie Paradise on ground It selfe did offer to his sober eye, In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, And none does others' happinesse envye; The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye, The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, The trembling groves, the christall running by, And, that which all fair workes doth most aggrace, The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.

Mountain scenery was seldom visited or described.

Michael Drayton (1731) wrote an ode on the Peak, in Derbyshire:

Though on the utmost Peak A while we do remain, Amongst the mountains bleak Exposed to sleet and rain, No sport our hours shall break To exercise our vein.

It is clear that he preferred his comfort to everything, for he goes on:

Yet many rivers clear Here glide in silver swathes, And what of all most dear Buxton's delicious baths, Strong ale and noble chear T' assuage breem winter's scathes.

Thomas Carew (1639) sings:

Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose, For in your beauties' orient deep These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither do stray The golden atoms of the day, For in pure love Heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale, when May is past, For in your sweet dividing throat She winters and keeps warm her note. Ask me no more where these stars shine That downwards fall in dead of night, For in your eyes they sit, and there Fixed become, as in their sphere. Ask me no more if east or west The phoenix builds her spicy nest, For unto you at last she flies And in your fragrant bosom dies.

William Drummond (1746) avowed a taste which he knew to be very unfashionable:

Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own Though solitary, who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love. O how more sweet is birds' harmonious moan Or the soft sobbings of the widow'd dove, Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne.... O how more sweet is zephyr's wholesome breath And sighs perfum'd, which new-born flowers unfold.

Another sonnet, to a nightingale, says:

Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours Of winters past or coming void of care, Well pleased with delights which present are, Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers; To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare, And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare, A stain to human sense in sin that lowers, What soul can be so sick which by thy songs Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs?

He greets Spring:

Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flowers; The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain, The clouds for joy in pearls weep down their showers.

Robert Blair (1746) sings in The Grave:

Oh, when my friend and I In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on, Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down Upon the sloping cowslip-cover'd bank, Where the pure limpid stream has slid along In grateful errors through the underwood, Sweet murmuring; methought the shrill-tongu'd thrush Mended his song of love, the sooty blackbird Mellowed his pipe and soften'd every note, The eglantine smell'd sweeter and the rose Assum'd a dye more deep, whilst ev'ry flower Vied with its fellow plant in luxury Of dress. Oh! then the longest summer's day Seem'd too, too much in haste, still the full heart Had not imparted half; half was happiness Too exquisite to last—Of joys departed Not to return, how painful the remembrance!

The great painter of Nature among the poets was James Thomson. He was not original, but followed Pope, who had lighted up the seasons in a dry, dogmatic way in Windsor Forest, and pastoral poems, and after the publication of his Winter the taste of the day carried him on. His deep and sentimental affection for Nature was mixed up with piety and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend Paterson:

Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; and now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on the point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown. The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect model of the truest happy life.

It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. He would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine goodness in all. His Seasons were the result.

There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some have charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only catalogues of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the inner life.

Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted by sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape paintings.

The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not live, and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not neglect grander scenery; his muse

"Sees Caledonia, in romantic view: Her airy mountains, from the waving main Invested with a keen diffusive sky, Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand Planted of old; her azure lakes between, Poured out extensive and of watery wealth Full; winding, deep and green, her fertile vales, With many a cool translucent brimming flood Washed lovely...."

And in A Hymn we read:

Ye headlong torrents rapid and profound, Ye softer floods that lead the humid maze Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself.

It is the lack of human life, the didactic tone, and the wearisome detail which destroys interest in the Seasons—the lack of happy moments of invention. Yet it had great influence on his contemporaries in rousing love for Nature, and it contains many beautiful passages. For example:

Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veiled in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.

His most artistic poem is Winter:

When from the pallid sky the sun descends With many a spot, that o'er his glaring orb Uncertain wanders, stained; red fiery streaks Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet Which master to obey; while rising slow, Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. Seen through the turbid fluctuating air, The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray; Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom, And long behind them trail the whitening blaze. Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf, And on the flood the dancing feather floats. With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned, The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale.... Retiring from the downs, where all day long They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight And seek the closing shelter of the grove, Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies. Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore, Eat into caverns by the restless wave And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare.

The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in Winter:

Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year! How mighty, how majestic, are thy works! With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings!

Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated the Seasons, when he had finished his Irdisches Vergnuegen in Gott. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138 verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74, while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length; and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together, but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional sort. He says himself[7] that he took up the study of poetry first as an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same time.'

So I resolved to sing the praises of the Creator to the best of my powers, and felt the more bound to do it, because I held that such great and almost inexcusable neglect and ingratitude was a wrong to the Creator, and unbecoming in Christendom. I therefore composed different pieces, chiefly in Spring, and tried my best to describe the beauties of Nature, in order, through my own pleasure, to rekindle the praise of the wise Creator in myself and others, and this led at last to the first part of my Irdisches Vergnuegen. (1721.)

His evidence from animal and plant life for the teleological argument is very laughable; take, for example, the often-quoted chamois:

The fat is good for phthisis, the gall for the face, chamois flesh is good to eat, and its blood cures vertigo—the skin is no less useful. Doth not the love as well as the wisdom and almightiness of the Creator shine forth from this animal?

For the rest, the following lines from Irdisches Vergnuegen in Gott will serve to give an idea of his style; they certainly do honour to his laborious attempt to miss none of the charms of the wood:

Lately as I sat on the green grass Shaded by a lime tree, and read, I raised my eyes by chance and saw Different trees here and there, some far, some near, Some half, some all in light, and some in shade, Their boughs bowed down by leaves. I saw how beautifully both air and flowery mead Were crowned and adorned. To describe the green grace And the landscape it makes so sweet, And at the same time prolong my pleasure, I took pencil and paper And tried to describe the beautiful trees in rhyme, To the glory of God their Creator. Of all the beauty the world lays before our eyes, There certainly is none which does not pale Beside green boughs, Nothing to compare for pure beauty with a wood. The green roofing overhead Makes me feel young again; It hangs there, a living tapestry, To the glory of God and our delight.... Beyond many trees that lay in shade I often saw one in full light; A human eye would scarce believe How sweetly twilight, light and darkness Meet side by side in leafy trees. Peering through the leaves with joy We notice, as we see the leaves Lighted from one side only, That we can almost see the sun Mixing gold with the tender green, etc.

and so on for another twenty lines.

Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to Ueber das Firmament:

As lately in the sapphire depths, Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end, In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed, And my absorbed glance, now here, now there, But ever deeper sank—horror came over me, My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast. That infinite vast vault, True picture of Eternity, Since without birth or end From God alone it comes.... It overwhelmed my soul. The mighty dome of deep dark light, Bright darkness without birth or bound, Swallowed the very world—burying thought. My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought; I lost myself, So suddenly it beat me down, And threatened with despair. But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss, All present God! in Thee—I found myself again.

While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of Lenotre, England passed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild in its own way, and Pope wrote:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the column, or the arch to bend, To swell the terrace or to sink the grot, In all let Nature never be forgot.

William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its characteristic features—the gentle undulations, the freshness of the green, the wealth of trees—and based his garden-craft on these.

The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of lawn and scattered groups of trees of different sorts—dark fir and alder here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with streams running through them stood out in relief against dark woodland.

Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth, disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding landscape, but to merge into it—to be not Art, but a bit of Nature. It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the rest—waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of the Chinese.[10]

The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples.

Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.

These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion.

Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and ceremony. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the ruins and fortresses of mediaeval romance. And not only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, passed through these stages of development, for no disease is so infectious as fashion.

It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature herself, whether grass, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape gardening.

In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct role in Robinson Crusoe, and wins as little notice there as in its numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present.

The German Simplicissimus closed with a Robinsonade, in which the hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of Robinson Crusoe were in much the same position. Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of noble, patient character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost innocence of man.

Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of the English gardens, and disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more impressed by Robinson Crusoe than by any other book. It was the first book his Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and unspoilt taste.



CHAPTER X

THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC FEELING

This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo.

The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to restitution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other.

German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic love-passages, affected by the French. At first description and moralizing preponderated.

In 1729 Haller's Alps appeared. It had the merit of drawing the eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, but shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but landscape is looked at almost entirely from the moralizing or utilitarian standpoint.

'Here, where the majestic Mount Gothard elevates its summit above the clouds, and where the earth itself seems to approach the sun, Nature has assembled in one spot all the choicest treasure of the globe. The deserts of Libya, indeed, afford us greater novelties, and its sandy plains are more fertile in monsters: but thou, favoured region, art adorned with useful productions only, productions which can satisfy all the wants of man. Even those heaps of ice, those frowning rocks in appearance so sterile, contribute largely to the general good, for they supply inexhaustible fountains to fertilize the land. What a magnificent picture does Nature spread before the eye, when the sun, gilding the top of the Alps, scatters the sea of vapours which undulates below! Through the receding vale the theatre of a whole world rises to the view! Rocks, valleys, lakes, mountains, and forests fill the immeasurable space, and are lost in the wide horizon. We take in at a single glance the confines of divers states, nations of various characters, languages, and manners, till the eyes, overcome by such extent of vision, drop their weary lids, and we ask of the enchanted fancy a continuance of the scene.

'When the first emotion of astonishment has subsided, how delightful is it to observe each several part which makes up this sublime whole! That mass of hills, which presents its graceful declivity covered with flocks of sheep whose bleatings resound through the meadows; that large clear lake, which reflects from its level surface sunbeams gently curved; those valleys, rich in verdure, which compose by their various outlines points of perspective which contract in the distance of the landscape! Here rises a bare steep mountain laden with the accumulated snow of ages; its icy head rests among the clouds, repelling the genial rays of the moon and the fervid heat of the dog-star: there a chain of cultivated hills spreads before the delighted eye; their green pastures are enlivened by flocks, and their golden corn waves in the wind: yet climates so different as those are only separated by a cool, narrow valley. Behold that foaming torrent rushing from a perpendicular height! Its rapid waves dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond their limits. Divided by the rapidity of its course and the depth of the abyss where it falls, it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at length scattered into humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the rainbow, and, suspended over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous dew. The traveller beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards the sky, and issuing from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil of another.

'Those desert places uncheered by the rays of the sun, those frozen abysses deprived of all verdure, hide beneath their sterile sands invaluable treasures, which defy the rigour of the seasons and all the injuries of time! 'Tis in dark and marshy recesses, upon the damp grottos, that crystal rocks are formed. Thus splendour is diffused through their melancholy vaults, and their shadowy depths gutter with the colours of the rainbow. O Nature, how various are thy operations, how infinite thy fertility!'

We cannot agree with Frey[1] that 'these few strophes may serve as sufficient proof that Haller's poetry is still, even among the mass of Alpine poetry, unsurpassed for intense power of direct vision, and easily makes one forget its partial lack of flexibility of diction.'

The truth is, flexibility is entirely lacking; but the lines do express the taste for open-air life among the great sublimities and with simple people. The poem is not romantic but idyllic, with a touch of the elegiac. It is the same with the poem On the Origin of Evil (Book I.):

On those still heights whence constant springs flow down, I paused within a copse, lured by the evening breeze; Wide country lay spread out beneath my feet, Bounded by its own size alone.... Green woods covered the hills, through which the pale tints of the fields Shone pleasantly. Abundance and repose held sway far as the eye could reach.... And yonder wood, what left it to desire With the red tints upon the half-bare beeches And the rich pine's green shade o'er whitened moss? While many a sun-ray through the interstices A quivering light upon the darkness shed, Blending in varying hues green night with golden day How pleasant is the quiet of the copse! ... Yea, all I see is given by Providence, The world itself is for its burgher's joy; Nature's inspired with the general weal, The highest goodness shews its trace in all.

Friedrich von Hagedorn, too, praises country pleasures in The Feeling of Spring:

Enamelled meadows! freshly decked in green, I sing your praises constantly; Nature and Spring have decked you out.... Delightful quiet, stimulant of joy, How enviable thou art!

This idyllic taste for country life was common at the time, especially among the so-called 'anacreontists.' Gleim, for instance, in his Praise of Country Life: 'Thank God that I have fled from the bustle of the world and am myself again under the open sky.'

And in The Countryman:

How happy is he who, free from cares, ploughs his father's fields; every morning the sun shines on the grass in which he lies.

And Joh. Friedrich von Cronegk:

Fly from sordid cares and the proud tumult of cities ... here in the peaceful valley shy wisdom sports at ease, where the smiling Muse crowns herself with dewy roses.

With this idyllic tone it is not surprising to find the religious feeling of many hymn writers; for instance, Gleim in The Goodness of God:

For whom did Thy goodness create the world so beautiful, O God? For whom are the flowers on hill and dale? ... Thou gavest us power to perceive the beauty.

And above all, honest Gellert:

The skies, the globe, the seas, praise the eternal glory. O my Creator, when I consider Thy might and the wisdom of Thy ways.... Sunshine and storm preach Thee, and the sands of the sea.

Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled Brockes.

Julian Schmidt says[3]: 'Later on, descriptive poetry, like didactic, fell into disgrace; but at that time this dwelling upon the minutiae of Nature served to enrich the imagination; Kleist's descriptions are thoughtful and interesting.' It is easy to see that his longer poems cost him much labour; they were not the pure songs of feeling that gush out spontaneously like a spring from the rock. But in eloquence and keenness of observation he excelled his contemporaries, although he, too, followed the fashion of eighteenth-century literature, and coquetted with Greek nymphs and deities, and the names of winds and maidens.

The tendency to depression, increased by his failure to adapt himself to military life, made him incline more and more to solitude.

To Doris begins:

Now spring doth warm the flakeless air, And in the brook the sky reflects her blue, Shepherds in fragrant flowers find delight ... The corn lifts high its golden head, And Zephyr moves in waves across the grain, Her robe the field embroiders; the young rush Adorns the border of each silver stream, Love seeks the green night of the forest shade, And air and sea and earth and heaven smile.

Sighs for Rest:

O silver brook, my leisure's early soother, When wilt thou murmur lullabies again? When shall I trace thy sliding smooth and smoother, While kingfishers along thy reeds complain; Afar from thee with care and toil opprest, Thy image still can calm my troubled breast.

O ye fair groves and odorous violet valleys, Girt with a garland blue of hills around, Thou quiet lake, where, when Aurora sallies, Her golden tresses seem to sweep the ground: Soft mossy turf, on which I wont to stray, For me no longer bloom thy flow'rets gay. As when the chilly nights of March arise And whirl the howling dust in eddies swift, The sunbeams wither in the dimmer skies, O'er the young ears the sand and pebbles drift: So the war rages, and the furious forces The air with smoke bespread, the field with corses.

The vineyard bleeds, and trampled is the com, Orchards but heat the kettles of the camp....

As when a lake which gushing rains invade Breaks down its dams, and fields are overflowed. So floods of fire across the region spread, And standing corn by crackling flames is mowed: Bellowing the cattle fly; the forests burn, And their own ashes the old stems in-urn.

He too, who fain would live in purity, Feels nature treacherous, hears examples urge, As one who, falling overboard at sea, Beats with his arms and feet the buoyant surge, And climbs at length against some rocky brink, Only beneath exhausted strength to sink.

My cheek bedewed with holy tears in vain, To love and heaven I vowed a spotless truth: Too soon the noble tear exhaled again, Example conquered, and the glow of youth To live as live one's comrades seems allowed; He who would be a man, must quit the crowd.

He, too, wrote with hymn-like swing in praise of the Creator: 'Great is the Lord! the unnumbered heavens are the chambers of his fortress, storm and thunder-clouds his chariot.'

The most famous of his poems, and the one most admired in his own day, was Spring. This is full of love for Nature. It describes a country walk after the muggy air of town, and conveys a vivid impression of fresh germinating spring, though it is overlaid by monotonous detail:

Receive me, hallowed shades! Ye dwellings of sweet buss! Umbrageous arches full of sleeping dark delights ... Receive me! Fill my soul with longing and with rest ... And you, ye laughing fields, Valleys of roses, labyrinths of streams, I will inhale an ecstasy with your balsamic breath, And, lying in the shade, on strings of gold Sing your indwelling joys.... On rosy clouds, with rose and tulip crowned, Spring has come down from heaven.... The air grew softer, fields took varied hues, The shades were leafy, and soft notes awoke And flew and warbled round the wood in twilight greenery. Brooks took a silver tint, sweet odours filled the air, The early shepherd's pipe was heard by Echo in the dale.... Most dear abode! Ah, were I but allowed Down in the shade by yon loquacious brook Henceforth to live! O sky! thou sea of love, Eternal spring of health, will not thy waters succour me? Must, my life's blossom wither, stifled by the weeds?

Johann Peter Uz, who was undervalued because of his sickly style, wrote many little songs full of feeling for Nature, though within narrow limits. Their titles shew the pastoral taste[4]:—Spring, Morning, Shepherd's Morning Song, The Muse with the Shepherds, The Meadow in the Country, Vintage, Evening, May, The Rose, Summer and Wine, Winter Night, Longing for Spring, etc.

Many are fresh and full of warm feeling, especially the Spring Songs:

See the blossoming of Spring! Will't not taste the joys it showers? Dost not feel its impulse thrill? Friends! away our cares we'll fling! In the joyous time of flowers, Love and Bacchus have their will.

and

O forest, O green shady paths, Dear place of spring's display! My good luck from the thronging town Has brought me here away.

O what a fresh breeze flows Down from the wooded hill, How pleasantly the west wind flies With rustling dewy wing Across the vale, Where all is green and blossoming.

The personification is more marked in this:

Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming robe With roses round his head. Smiling he comes, O God! The hours conduct him to his flowery throne Into the groves he enters and they bloom; fresh green is on the plain, The forest shade returns, the west wind lovingly unfurls Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin to sing. The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with beauty that enchants, O Thou rich source of all the beautiful ... My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love.

His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas, that Kleist could write to Gleim[5]: 'The odes please me more the more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault, too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.'

Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French style[6] far less than the others—than Hagedorn, for example; and though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[7] but with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness.

In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he wrote:

Lie down in early spring on yon green moss, By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke, My brother.... Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above, So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks In distant wood, near plain and careless glade, Here on my little hill and in the clover.... Dost hear the rustle of the streamlet through the wood?

Jacobi was one whose heart, as he said of Gleim, took a warm interest in all that breathed, even a violet, and sought sympathy and companionship in the whole range of creation.

This is from his Morning Song:

See how the wood awakes, how from the lighted heights With the soft waving breeze The morning glory smiles in the fresh green.... Here by the rippling brook and quivering flower, We catch Love's rustle as she gently sweeps Like Spring's own breath athwart the plains.

Another song is;

Tell me, where's the violet fled. Late so gayly blowing. Springing 'neath fair Flora's tread, Choicest sweets bestowing? Swain, the vernal scene is o'er, And the violet blooms no more.

Say, where hides the blushing rose, Pride of fragrant morning, Garland meet for beauty's brows, Hill and dale adorning? Gentle maid, the summer's fled, And the hapless rose is dead.

Bear me then to yonder rill, Late so freely flowing, Watering many a daffodil On its margin glowing. Sun and wind exhaust its store, Yonder rivulet glides no more.

Lead me to the bowery shade, Late with roses flaunting, Loved resort of youth and maid, Amorous ditties chanting. Hail and wind with fury shower, Leafless mourns the rifled bower!

Say, where bides the village maid, Late yon cot adorning? Oft I've met her in the glade Fair and fresh as morning. Swain, how short is beauty's bloom, Seek her in her grassy tomb.

Whither roves the tuneful swain Who, of rural pleasures, Rose and violet, rill and plain, Sang in deftest measures? Maiden, swift life's vision flies, Death has closed the poet's eyes.

To Nature runs thus:

Leaves are falling, mists are twining, and to winter sleep inclining Are the trees upon the plain, In the hush of stillness ere the snowflakes hide them, Friendly Nature, speak to me again! Thou art echo and reflection of our striving, Thou art painter of our hopes and of our fears, Thou art singer of our joys and of our sorrows, Of our consolations and our groans....

While feeling for Nature was all of this character, idyllic, sensitive, sympathetic, but within very narrow bounds, and the poets generally were wandering among Greek and Latin bucolics and playing with Damon, Myrtil, Chloe, and Daphnis, Salomon Gessner made a speciality of elegiac pastoral poetry. He was a better landscapist than poet, and his drawings to illustrate his idylls were better than the poems themselves. The forest, for instance, and the felling of the tree, are well drawn; whereas the sickly sweet Rococo verse in imitation of the French, and reminding one more of Longos than Theocritus, is lifeless. His rhapsody about Nature is uncongenial to modern readers, but his love was real.

The introduction 'to the Reader'[8] is characteristic:

These Idylls are the fruits of some of my happiest hours; of those hours when imagination and tranquillity shed their sweetest influence over me, and, excluding all which belongs to the period in which we live, recalled all the charms and delights of the Golden Age. A noble and well-regulated mind dwells with pleasure on these images of calm tranquillity and uninterrupted happiness, and the scenes in which the poet delineates the simple beauties of uncorrupted nature are endeared to us by the resemblance we fancy we perceive in them to the most blissful moments that we nave ourselves enjoyed. Often do I fly from the city and seek the deepest solitudes; there, the beauties of the landscape soothe and console my heart, and gradually disperse those impressions of solicitude and disgust which accompanied me from the town; enraptured, I give up my whole soul to the contemplation of Nature, and feel, at such moments, richer than an Utopian monarch, and happier than a shepherd of the Golden Age.

This is a true picture of the time! Man knew that he was sick, and fled from town and his fellows into solitude, there to dream himself back to a happier past, and revel in the purity and innocence, the healing breath, of forest and field.

The magic of moonlight began to be felt. Mirtilla

perceived his old father slumbering in the moonbeams.... Mirtilla stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly on the old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy bedewed his cheeks.... How beautiful! how beautiful is the landscape! How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven through the broken clouds! They fly, they pass away, these towering clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny landscape.... Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture! From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild influence nourishes, all is wonderful! What rapture overpowers me when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and examine the various flowers and herbs and their little inhabitants; when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry heavens!... Wrapt in each other's arms, let us contemplate the approach of morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams of moonlight; and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us breathe out in broken accents our praises and thanksgivings. Ah! what inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the transports of the tenderest love.

Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards Nature.

The aesthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote On the Beauty of Nature. Crugot's widely-read work of edification, Christ in Solitude (1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical and pietist clergy; and Spalding's Human Vocation[9] (written with a warmth that reminds one of Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed. He says:

Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great sensitiveness, nourish my mind... I open eye and ear, and through these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides: flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or of the majesty of innumerable worlds. Even the commonest and most familiar things in Nature give me endless delight, when I feel them with a heart attuned to joy and admiration.... I lose myself, absorbed in delight, in the consideration of all this general beauty, of which I hold myself to be a not disfigured part.

Klopstock, the torch-bearer of Germany's greatest poets, owed much of his power of the wing to religion. He introduced that new epoch in the literature of his country which culminated in Goethe. As so often happens in mental development, the reaction against prevailing conditions and the advance to higher ones, in the middle of the eighteenth century, led first of all to the opposite extreme—balance was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which compelled the stiff poetic forms, clumsy as they were, to new rhythm and melodious cadence. And although his style degenerated into mannerism in the Messias, for the youthful impetus which had carried his Pegasus over the clouds to the stars could not keep it there without artificial aid, the immense value of his influence remained. He is one of the most interesting representatives, not only of his own, but of all similar periods of exaggerated feelings and ideals. Despite his loftiness of thought and speech, and his seraphic raptures, he was not without a full share of sensuous development, and women's eyes, or a girl's rosy lips, would draw him away from the finest view in the world.

A mind so intent upon the noble and beautiful was sure to be enthusiastic about Nature; his correspondence is the best witness to this, and at the same time throws side-lights upon the period.

It is difficult to-day to understand the influence which the Messias had upon its readers; even Friedenkende spent happy hours reading it with pious tears of delight, and young and old were of the same opinion.

There is a pretty letter from Gustchen Stolberg[10] to Klopstock, which runs thus:

UETERSEN, 25 April 1776.

In the garden. Yes, in the garden, dearest Klopstock! I have just been walking about, it was so beautiful: the little birds were singing, violets and other flowers wafted their fragrance to me, and I began thinking very warmly of all whom I dearly, dearly love, and so very soon came to my dear Klopstock, who certainly has no truer friend than I am, though perhaps others express it better ... Thanks, thanks, for your very delightful little letter—how dear to me I don't tell you—can't tell you.

C. F. Cramer was his enthusiastic panegyrist. It is not only what he says of the private life and special taste of his adored friend which is noteworthy, but the way in which he does it—the tone in which, as a cultivated man of the day, he judged him. 'He will paint and paint Nature. For this he must be acquainted with her. This is why he loves her so well. This is why he strays by the brook and weeps. This is why in spring he goes out into the fields of blossoms, and his eyes run over with tears. All creation fills him with yearning and delight. He goes from mountain to valley like a man in a dream. When he sees a stream, he follows its course; when a hill, he must climb it; when a river—oh! if only he could rush with it to the sea! A rock—oh! to look down from its crags to the land below! A hawk hovers over him—oh! to have its wings and fly so much nearer to the stars! He stands for hours looking at a flower or moss, throws himself down on the grass and decks his hat with ivy and cornflowers. He goes by moonlight to visit the graves and think of death, immortality, and eternal life. Nothing hinders his meditations. He sees everything in relation to something else. Every visible object has an invisible companion, so ardently, so entirely, so closely does he feel it all.'

This, coming straight from life, tells us more than a volume of odes; it contains the real feeling of the time, sensitive, dreamy, elegiac.

His friend goes on: 'He walks often and likes it, but generally looks for sunny places; he goes very slowly, which is fatal for me, for I run when I walk ... Often he stands still and silent, as if there were knots which he could not untie (in his thoughts). And truly there are unknown depths of feeling as well as thought.'

In another place: 'He went out and gloated over the great scene of immeasurable Nature. Orion and the Pleiades moved over his head, the dear moon was opposite. Looking intently into her friendly face, he greeted her repeatedly: "Moon, Moon, friend of my thoughts; hurry not away, dear Moon, but stay. What is thy name? Laura, Cynthia, Cyllene? Or shall I call thee beautiful Betty of the Sky?" ... He loved country walks; we made for lonely places, dark fearsome thickets, lonely unfrequented paths, scrambled up all the hills, spied out every bit of Nature, came to rest at last under a shady rock ... Klopstock's life is one constant enjoyment. He gives himself up to feeling, and revels in Nature's feast ... Winter is his favourite time of year....[11] He preaches skating with the unction of a missionary to the heathen, and not without working miracles, ... the ice by moonlight is a feast of the Gods to him ... only one rule, we do not leave the river till the moon has gone.' Klopstock described this in his Skating:

O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn Drives glowing now, and now restrains, On city hearths let faggots burn, But come with me to crystal plains. The scene is filled with vapouring light, As when the winter morning's prime Looks on the lake. Above it night Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime. How still and white is all around! How rings the track with new sparr'd frost! Far off the metal's cymbal sound Betrays thee, for a moment lost ...

Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg:

It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is always trying to find them in his walks.

This illustrates the lines in Stintenburg:

Isle of pious solitude, Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc.

but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry.

He wrote of Soroe,[12] one of the loveliest places in the Island of Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant place'; where 'By a sacred tree, on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island ... Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the tree-tops.'

The day on which he composed The Lake of Zurich was one of the pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and still tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.'

But, unlike St Preux, he 'seemed less impressed by our scenery than by the beauty of our girls,[13] and his letters bear out the remark.[14] Yet delight in Nature was always with him: Klopstock's lofty morality pours forth all through it. Nature, love, fame, wine, everything is looked at from an ennobling point of view.'

Fair is the majesty of all thy works On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair! But fairer the glad face Enraptured with their view. Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake, Or—hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew— Come on the roseate tip Of evening's breezy wing, And teach my song with glee of youth to glow, Sweet joy, like thee—with glee of shouting youths, Or feeling Fanny's laugh.

Behind us far already Uto lay. At whose feet Zurich in the quiet vale Feeds her free sons: behind— Receding vine-clad hills. Uncloud'd beamed the top of silver Alps, And warmer beat the heart of gazing youths, And warmer to their fair Companions spoke its glow. And Haller's Doris sang, the pride of song; And Hirzel's Daphne, dear to Kleist and Gleim; And we youths sang and felt As each were—Hagedorn.

Soon the green meadow took us to the cool And shadowy forest, which becrowns the isle. Then cam'st thou, Joy; thou cam'st Down in full tide to us; Yes, goddess Joy, thyself; we felt, we clasp'd, Best sister of humanity, thyself, With thy dear innocence Accompanied, thyself.

Sweet thy inspiring breath, O cheerful Spring; When the meads cradle thee, and their soft airs Into the hearts of youths And hearts of virgins glide, Thou makest feeling conqueror. Ah! through thee Fuller, more tremulous, heaves each blooming breast; With lips spell-freed by thee Young love unfaltering pleads. Fair gleams the wine, when to the social change Of thought, or heart-felt pleasure, it invites, And the 'Socratic' cup With dewy roses bound, Sheds through the bosom bliss, and wakes resolves, Such as the drunkard knows not—proud resolves Emboldening to despair Whate'er the sage disowns.

Delightful thrills against the panting heart Fame's silver voice—and immortality Is a great thought.... But sweeter, fairer, more delightful, 'tis On a friend's arm to know oneself a friend.... O were ye here, who love me though afar ... How would we build us huts of friendship, here Together dwell for ever.

This is of Fredensborg on an August day:

Here, too, did Nature tarry, when her hand Pour'd living beauty over dale and hill, And to adorn this pleasant land Long time she lingered and stood still.... The lake how tranquil! From its level brim The shore swells gently, wooded o'er with green, And buries in its verdure dim The lustre of the summer e'en....

The inner and outer life are closely blended in The Early Grave:

Welcome, O silver moon, Fair still companion of the night! Friend of the pensive, flee not soon; Thou stayest, and the clouds pass light.

Young waking May alone Is fair as summer's night so still, When from his locks the dews drop down, And, rosy, he ascends the hill.

Ye noble souls and true, Whose graves with sacred moss are strawn. Blest were I, might I see with you The glimmering night, the rosy dawn.

This is true lyric feeling, spontaneous, not forced. Many of his odes, and parts of the Messias, shew great love for Nature. There is a fine flight of imagination in The Festival of Spring:

Not into the ocean of all the worlds would I plunge—not hover where the first created, the glad choirs of the sons of light, adore, deeply adore and sunk in ecstasy. Only around the drop on the bucket, only around the earth, would I hover and adore. Hallelujah! hallelujah! the drop on the bucket flowed also out of the hand of the Almighty.

When out of the hand of the Almighty the greater earth flowed, when the streams of light rushed, and the seven stars began to be—then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty.

When a stream of light rushed, and our sun began to be, a cataract of waves of light poured, as adown the rock a storm-cloud, and girded Orion, then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty. Who are the thousandfold thousands, who all the myriads that inhabit the drop?...

But thou, worm of Spring, which, greenly golden, art fluttering beside me, thou livest and art, perhaps, ah! not immortal....

The storm winds that carry the thunder, how they roar, how with loud waves they stream athwart the forest! Now they hush, slow wanders the black cloud....

Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now is the earth refreshed....

Behold Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle pleasant murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace.

In another ode, The Worlds, he calls the stars 'drops of the ocean.'

Again, in Death he shews the sense of his own nothingness, in presence of the overpowering greatness of the Creator:

Ye starry hosts that glitter in the sky, How ye exalt me! Trancing is the sight Of all Thy glorious works, Most High. How lofty art Thou in Thy wondrous might; What joy to gaze upon these hosts, to one Who feels himself so little, God so great, Himself but dust, and the great God his own! Oh, when I die, such rapture on me wait!

As regards our subject, Klopstock performed this function—he tuned the strings of feeling for Nature to a higher pitch, thereby excelling all his contemporaries. His poetry always tended to extravagance; but in thought, feeling, and language alike, he was ahead of his time.

The idyllic was now cultivated with increased fervour, especially by the Goettingen Brotherhood of Poets. The artificial and conventional began to wane, and Nature's own voice was heard again. The songs of Claudius were like a breath of spring.[15] His peasant songs have the genuine ring; they are hail-fellow-well-met with Nature. Hebel is the only modern poet like him.

EVENING SONG

The lovely day-star's run its course.... Come, mop my face, dear wife, And then dish up.... The silvery moon will look down from his place And preside at our meal over dishes and grace.

He hated artificiality:

Simple joy in Nature, free from artifice, gives as great a pleasure as an honest lover's kiss.

His Cradle Song to be sung by Moonlight is delightful in its naive humour (the moon was his special favourite):

Sleep then, little one. Why dost thou weep? Moonlight so tender and quiet so deep, Quickly and easily cometh thy sleep. Fond of all little ones is the good moon; Girls most of all, but he even loves boys. Down from up there he sends beautiful toys.... He's old as a raven, he goes everywhere; Even when father was young, he was there.

The pearl of his poems is the exquisite Evening Song:

The moon hath risen on high, And in the clear dark sky The golden stars all brightly glow; And black and hushed the woods, While o'er the fields and floods The white mists hover to and fro.