How still the earth, how calm! What dear and home-like charm From gentle twilight doth she borrow! Like to some quiet room, Where, wrapt in still soft gloom, We sleep away the daylight's sorrow.

Boie's Evening Song is in the same key. None of the moonshine poets of his day expressed night-fall like this:

How still it is! How soft The breezes blow! The lime leaves lisp in whisper and echo answers low; Scarce audibly the rivulet running amid the flower With murmuring ripple laps the edge of yonder mystic bower. And ever darker grows the veil thou weavest o'er the land, And ever quieter the hush—a hush as of the grave.... Listen! 'tis Night! she comes, unlighted by a star, And with the slow sweep of her heavy wing Awes and revives the timid earth.

Buerger sings in praise of idyllic comfort in The Village, and Hoelty's mild enthusiasm, touched with melancholy, turned in the same direction.

My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm; all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a wife in my hut.

The beginning of his Country Life shews that moralizing was still in the air:

Happy the man who has the town escaped! To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks, The shining pebbles preach Virtue's and wisdom's lore.... The nightingale on him sings slumber down; The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet, When shines the lovely red Of morning through the trees. Then he admires Thee in the plain, O God! In the ascending pomp of dawning day, Thee in Thy glorious sun. The worm—the budding branch— Where coolness gushes in the waving branch Or o'er the flowers streams the fountain, rests, Inhales the breadth of prime The gentle airs of eve. His straw-decked thatch, where doves bask in the sun, And play, and hop, invites to sweeter rest Than golden halls of state Or beds of down afford. To him the plumy people Chatter and whistle on his And from his quiet hand Peck crumbs or peas or grains

His Winter Song runs:

Summer joys are o'er, Flow'rets bloom no more; Wintry joys are sweeping, Through the snow-drifts peeping; Cheerful evergreen Rarely now is seen.

No more plumed throng Charms the woods with song; Ice-bound trees are glittering, Merry snow-birds twittering, Fondly strive to cheer Scenes so cold and drear.

Winter, still I see Many charms in thee, Love thy chilly greeting, Snow-storms fiercely beating, And the dear delights Of the long, long nights.

Hoeltz was the most sentimental of this group; Joh. Heinrich Voss was more robust and cheerful. He put his strength into his longer poems; the lyrics contain a great deal of nonsense. An extract from Luise will shew his idyllic taste:

Wandering thus through blue fields of flax and acres of barley, both paused on the hill-top, which commands such a view of the whole lake, crisped with the soft breath of the zephyr and sparkling in sunshine; fair were the forests of white barked birch beyond, and the fir-trees, lovely the village at the foot half hid by the wood. Lovely Luise had welcomed her parents and shewn them a green mound under an old beech tree, where the prospect was very inviting. 'There we propose,' said she, to unpack and to spread the breakfast. Then we'll adjourn to the boat and be rowed for a time on the water,' etc.

We find the same taste, often expressed in a very original way, in both the brothers Stolberg. In Christian Stolberg's Elegy to Hangwitz, for instance, another poem has these lines:

Thither, where 'mong the trees of life, Where in celestial bowers Under your fig-tree, bowed with fruit And warranting repose, Under your pine, inviting shady joy, Unchanging blooms Eternal Spring!

Friedrich Stolberg was a very prophet of Nature; in his ode Nature he says:

He who does not love Nature cannot be my friend.

His prayer may serve as the motto of his day:

Holy Nature, heavenly fair, Lead me with thy parent care; In thy footsteps let me tread As a willing child is led. When with care and grief opprest, Soft I sink me on thy breast; On thy peaceful bosom laid, Grief shall cease, nor care invade. O congenial power divine, All my votive soul is thine. Lead me with thy parent care, Holy Nature, heavenly fair!

He, too, sang the moon; but Klopstock's influence seems to have carried him to higher flights than his contemporaries. He wrote in fine language of wild scenery, even sea and mountains, which had played no part in German poetry before.

TO THE SEA

Thou boundless, shining, glorious sea, With ecstasy I gaze on thee; Joy, joy to him whose early beam Kisses thy lip, bright ocean stream. Thanks for the thousand hours, old sea, Of sweet communion held with thee; Oft as I gazed, thy billowy roll Woke the deep feelings of my soul.

There are beautiful notes, reminding one of Goethe, in his Unsterbliche Juengling, Ode to a Mountain Torrent.

Immortal youth! Thou streamest forth from rocky caves; No mortal saw The cradle of thy might, No ear has heard Thy infant stammering in the gushing Spring. How lovely art thou in thy silver locks! How dreadful thundering from the echoing crags! At thy approach The firwood quakes; Thou easiest down, with root and branch, the fir Thou seizest on the rock, And roll'st it scornful like a pebble on. Thee the sun clothes in dazzling beams of glory, And paints with colours of the heavenly bow The clouds that o'er thy dusky cataracts climb. Why hasten so to the cerulean sea? Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good? Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks? Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed? Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; Youth, thou art here, Strong as a god, Free as a god, Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below, The wavering lustre of the silent sea, Now softly silvered by the swimming moon, Now rosy golden in the western beam; Youth, what is silken rest, And what the smiling of the friendly moon, Or gold or purple of the evening sun, To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds? Here thou canst wildly stream As bids thy heart; Below are masters, ever-changeful minds, Or the dead stillness of the servile main. Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; Youth, thou art here, Strong as a god, Free as a god.

Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day.



CHAPTER XI

THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC

Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete change in the culture of their time by their revolutionary originality. In such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins again. Out of touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling taste and mode of thought, they are a law unto themselves, and naturally tend to measure all things by themselves, while their too great subjectivity is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of passion and the conviction of the prophet.

Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example.

Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived in introspection, a spectator of his own struggles, his own waverings between an ideal of simple duty and the imperious demands of a selfish and sensuous ego. His passion for Nature partially atoned for his unamiable and doubtful character; he was false in many ways; but that feeling rang true—it was the best part of him, and of that 'idealism of the heart' whose right of rule he asserted in an age of artificiality and petty formalism. Those were no empty words in his third letter to Malesherbes:

'Which time of my life do you suppose I recall most often and most willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of youth; they were too few, too much mixed with bitterness, and they are too far away now. It is the time of my retreat, of my solitary walks—those fast-flying delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and simple Therese, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable Maker.

'When I got up early to go and watch the sunrise from my garden, when I saw a fine day begin, my first wish was that neither letters nor visitors might come to break its charm....

'Then I would seek out some wild place in the forest, some desert spot where there was nothing to shew the hand of man, and so tell of servitude and rule—some refuge which I could fancy I was the first to discover, and where no importunate third party came between Nature and me....

'The gold broom and the purple heather touched my heart; the majestic trees that shaded me, the delicate shrubs around, the astonishing variety of plants and flowers that I trod under foot, kept me alternately admiring and observing.'

His writings shew that with him return to Nature was no mere theory, but real earnest; they condemned the popular garden-craft and carpet fashions, and set up in their place the rights of the heart, and free enjoyment of Nature in her wild state, undisturbed by the hand of man.

It was Rousseau who first discovered that the Alps were beautiful. But to see this fact in its true light, we must glance back at the opinions of preceding periods.[1]

Though the Alpine countries were the arena of all sorts of enterprise, warlike and peaceful, in the fifteenth century, most of the interest excited by foreign parts was absorbed by the great voyages of discovery; the Alps themselves were almost entirely omitted from the maps.

To be just to the time, it must be conceded that security and comfort in travelling are necessary preliminaries to our modern mountain rapture, and in the Middle Ages these were non-existent. Roads and inns were few; there was danger from robbers as well as weather, so that the prevailing feelings on such journeys were misery and anxiety, not pleasure. Knowledge of science, too, was only just beginning; botany, geology, and geognosy were very slightly diffused; glacier theories were undreamt of. The sight of a familiar scene near the great snow-peaks roused men's admiration, because they were surprised to find it there; this told especially in favour of the idyllic mountain valleys.

Felix Fabri, the preacher monk of Ulm, visited the East in 1480 and 1483, and gave a lifelike description of his journeys through the Alps in his second account. He said[2]:

'Although the Alps themselves seem dreadful and rigid from the cold of the snow or the heat of the sun, and reach up to the clouds, the valleys below them are pleasant, and as rich and fruitful in all earthly delights as Paradise itself. Many people and animals inhabit them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter and never-melting ice.'

Very limited praise only extended to the valleys!

In the sixteenth century we have the records of those who crossed the Alps with an army, such as Adam Reissner, the biographer of the Frundsberg, and mention their 'awe' at sight of the valleys, and of those who had travelled to Italy and the East, and congratulated themselves that their troublesome wanderings through the Alps were over. Savants were either very sparing of words about their travels, or else made rugged verses which shewed no trace of mountain inspiration. There were no outbursts of admiration at sight of the great snow-peaks; 'horrible' and 'dreadful' were the current epithets. The aesthetic sense was not sufficiently developed, and discount as we will for the dangers and discomforts of the road, and, as with the earlier travellers to the East, for some lack of power of expression, the fact remains that mountains were not appreciated. The prevalent notion of beautiful scenery was very narrow, and even among cultured people only meant broad, level country.

B. Kiechel[3] (1585) was enthusiastic about 'the beautiful level scenery' of Lichfeld, and found it difficult to breathe among the Alps. Schickhart wrote: 'We were delighted to get away from the horrible tedious mountains,' and has nothing to say of the Brenner Pass except this poor joke: 'It did not burn us much, for what with the ice and very deep snow and horribly cold wind, we found no heat.' The most enthusiastic description is of the Lake of Como, by Paulus Jovius (1552), praising Bellagio,'[4] In the seventeenth century there was some admiration for the colossal proportions of the Alps, but only as a foil to the much admired valleys.

J.J. Grasser wrote of Rhoetia[5]: 'There are marble masses projecting, looking like walls and towers in imitation of all sorts of wonderful architecture. The villages lie scattered in the valleys, here and there the ground is most fruitful. There is luxuriance close to barrenness, gracefulness close to dreadfulness, life close to loneliness. The delight of the painter's eye is here, yet Nature excels all the skill of art. The very ravines, tortuous foot-paths, torrents, alternately raging and meagre, the arched bridges, waves on the lakes, varied dress of the fields, the mighty trees, in short, whatever heaven and earth grant to the sight, is an astonishment and a pastime to the enraptured eye of the wanderer.'

But this pastime depended upon the contrast between the charming valleys and the dreadful mountains.

Joseph Furttenbach (1591) writing about the same district of Thusis, described 'the little bridges, under which one hears the Rhine flowing with a great roar, and sees what a horrible cruel wilderness the place is.' In Conrad Gessner's De admiratione Montium (1541)[6] a passage occurs which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the sixteenth century one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a very different way, anticipating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so long as God grants me life I will climb some mountains every year, or at least one mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to strengthen my body and refresh my soul. What a pleasure it is to see the monstrous mountain masses, and lift one's head among the clouds. How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of creation! How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The earthly paradise is closed to them.'

Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century, travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in its own day.

But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.

Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) Itinera Alpina. Every corner of the Alps was explored—the Splugen, Julier, Furka, Gotthard, etc.—and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain beauty.

Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the Fourth Book of his Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in Gott); and in his Observations on the Blankenburg Marble he said: 'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful, their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and beautiful shew us a picture of earthly disorder.'[7] It was very long before expressions of horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the Alps. In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison we read: 'We bid adieu to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty and rocky mountains. We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers.... Every object which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' Savoy is 'one of the worst countries under Heaven.'

Addison,[8] on the other hand, wrote of the Alps from Ripaille: 'It was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of this river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the course of it naturally led us. We had sometimes on each side of us a vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand irregular steps and precipices ... but, as the materials of a fine landscape are not always the most profitable to the owner of them, we met with but little corn or pasturage,' etc. Lady Mary Wortley[9] Montagu wrote from Lyons, Sept. 25, 1718: 'The prodigious aspect of mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.'

On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and Lueneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after reading Emilia and La Nouvelle Heloise: 'The far-famed Alps, about which so much fuss has been made.'

Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature. He did not, as so many would have it—Du Bois Reymond, for example—discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12]

In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental and erotic pastorals. He opened up again for his country the taste for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and, above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality and false taste.

The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of previous periods of literature.

His Confessions opened not only the eyes of France, but the heart.

A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of Geneva. As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the country.

He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, forgetting the time. 'Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded themselves majestically before my eyes. I gloated over the beautiful spectacle while the sun was setting. At last, too late, I saw that the city gates were shut.'

From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men. In the Fourth Book of the Confessions he says, speaking of 1732:

'A view of the Lake of Geneva and its beautiful banks has had even in my idea a particular attraction that I cannot describe, not arising merely from the beauty of the prospect, but something, I know not what, more interesting which affects and softens me. 'Every time I have approached the Vaudois country, I have experienced an impression composed of the remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who was born there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de Wulson, who had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys I had made there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, more powerfully attractive than all the rest. When that ardent desire for a life of happiness and tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for which I was born) inflames my mind, 'tis ever to the country of Vaud, near the lake, on those charming plains, that imagination leads me. An orchard on the banks of that lake, and no other, is absolutely necessary; a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow, and a little boat; nor could I enjoy perfect happiness on earth without these concomitants.... On my way to Vevey I gave myself up to the soft melancholy ... I sighed and wept like a child.'

He clung to Nature, and most of all when surrounded by human beings; a morbid impulse to flee from them was always present as a negative element in the background of his love for her. His Fifth Reverie, the most beautiful one, shews this.

He had gone to the Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne. So far as he knew, no other traveller had paid any attention to the place; but that did not disturb his confidence in his own taste.

'The shores of the Lake of Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of the Lake of Geneva, because the rocks and woods come nearer to the water; but they are not less radiant. With less cultivation and fewer vineyards, towns, and houses, there are more green fields and shady sheltered spots, more contrasts and irregularities. As there are no good carriage roads on these happy shores, the district is little frequented by travellers; but it is interesting for the solitary contemplation of those who like to intoxicate themselves at their leisure with Nature's charms, and to retire into a silence unbroken by any sound but the eagle's cry, the intermittent warbling of birds, and the roar of torrents falling from the mountains,'

Here he had a delightful Robinson Crusoe existence. The only other human beings were the Bernese manager with his family and labourers. He counted his two months among the happiest of his life, and would have liked to stay for ever. True to his character, he proceeded to analyze the charm of the episode, and decided that it was made up of the dolce far niente, solitude, absence of books and writing materials, dealing with simple folk, healthy movement in the open air, field labour, and, above all, intercourse with Nature, both in admiring and studying her. He was seized with a passion for botanizing, and planned a comprehensive Flora Petrinsularis, dividing the whole island into quarters, so that no part might escape notice.

'There is nothing more strange than the ravishment, the ecstasy, I felt at each observation I made upon vegetable structure and organization.

'I would go by myself, throw myself into a boat when the water was calm, and row to the middle of the lake, and then, lying full-length in the boat with my eyes to the sky, I would let myself drift, sometimes for hours, lost in a thousand confused but delicious reveries.... Often when the sunset reminded me that it was time to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to pull with all my strength to get back before night-fall. At other times, instead of wandering about the lake, I amused myself by skirting the green shores of the island where the limpid water and cool shade often invited to a bathe.... When the lake was too rough for rowing, I would spend the afternoon scouring the island, botanizing right and left. I often sat down to dream at leisure in sunny, lonely nooks, or on the terraces and hillocks, to gaze at the superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores—one side crowned by near mountains, the other spread out in rich and fertile plains, across which the eye looked to the more distant boundary of blue mountains.... When evening fell, I came down from the higher parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making me oblivious of all other distraction, would plunge me into delicious reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it, restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."'

One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!'

However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had such moments—moments free from all earthly passion—on the lake and on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution.

The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany, of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating sense that he was part of a great system in which individual detail disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole.

'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her.

'The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge ... while plants grow under our very feet—lie, so to speak, in our very hands.'

He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when he was pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far off. His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his tormentors.

Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, the leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory.

So strong a personal attachment to Nature, solitude, and retirement had not been known before; but it was thrown into this high relief by the morbid dread of man and hatred of culture, which formed a constant dark background to his mind. It was a state of mind which naturally led to intense dislike of formal French gardens and open admiration of the English park. He rejected all the garnish of garden-craft, even grafted roses and fruit trees, and only admitted indigenous plants which grew outdoors.[13] It is greatly due to his feeling for English Park style that a healthier garden-craft gained ground in Germany as well as France. The foremost maxim of his philosophy and teaching, that everything is good as it comes from the bosom of mother Nature, or rather from the hand of God, and that man and his culture are responsible for all the evil, worked out in his attitude towards Nature.

He placed her upon a pedestal, worshipping her, and the Creator through her, and this made him the first to recognize the fact that study of Nature, especially of botany, should be an important factor in the education of children.

His Confessions, the truest photographs of a human character in existence, shew at once the keenest introspection and intense love for Nature. No one before Rousseau had been so aware of his own individuality—that is, of himself, as a being—who in this particular state only exists once, and has therefore not only relative but absolute value. He gave this peculiarity its full value, studying it as a thing outside himself, of which every detail was important, watching with great interest his own change of moods, the fluctuations of that double self which now lifted him to the ideal, now cast him down to the lowest and commonest. His relation to Nature was the best thing about him, and when he was happy, as he was for the first time in the society of Mademoiselle de Warens, Nature seemed lovelier than ever.

The scattered passages about Nature in the Confessions have a youthful freshness:

'The appearance of Aurora seemed so delightful one morning, that, putting on my clothes, I hastened into the country to see the rising of the sun. I enjoyed that pleasure to its utmost extent. It was one week after midsummer: the earth was covered with verdure and flowers; the nightingales, whose soft warblings were almost over, seemed to vie with each other, and, in concert with birds of various kinds, to bid adieu to spring and hail the approach of a beautiful summer's day.'

He loved rambling over hill and dale, even by night; thus, when he was at Lyons:

'It had been a very hot day, the evening was delightful, the dew moistened the parched grass, no wind was stirring; the air was fresh without chilliness, the setting sun had tinged the clouds with a beautiful crimson, which was again reflected by the water, and the trees bordering the terrace were filled with nightingales that were constantly answering each other's songs. I walked along in a kind of ecstasy, surrendering my heart and senses to the enjoyment of so many delights, and sighing only from regret at enjoying them alone. Absorbed in this pleasing reverie, I lengthened my walk till it grew very late, without perceiving I was tired. At length I threw myself on the steps of a kind of niche in a terrace wall. How charming was that couch! The trees formed a stately canopy, a nightingale sat directly over me, and with his soft notes lulled me to rest. How delicious my repose! my awakening more so. It was broad day; on opening my eyes, I saw the water, the verdure, and an adorable landscape before me.'

At the end of the Fourth Book he states his idea of beautiful scenery:

'I love to walk at my ease and stop at leisure ... travelling on foot in a fine country with fine weather ... and having an agreeable object to terminate my journey. It is already understood what I mean by a fine country; never can a flat one, though ever so beautiful, appear such to my eyes. I must have torrents, fir trees, black woods, mountains to climb or descend, and rugged roads with precipices on either side to alarm me. I experienced this pleasure to its utmost extent as I approached Chambery, not far from a mountain road called the Pas d'Echelle. Above the main road, hewn through the solid rock, a small river runs and rushes into fearful chasms, which it appears to have been millions of ages in forming. The road has been hedged by a parapet to prevent accidents, and I was thus enabled to contemplate the whole descent and gain vertigoes at pleasure, for a great part of my amusement in these steep rocks lies in their causing a giddiness and swimming in my head, which I am particularly fond of, provided I am in safety. Leaning therefore on the parapet, I remained whole hours, catching from time to time a glance of the froth and blue water whose rushing caught my ear, mingled with the cries of ravens and other birds of prey that flew from rock to rock and bush to bush at 600 feet below me.'

His preference was for the wild and sublime, and he was glad that this was not a popular taste; but he could write glowing descriptions of more idyllic scenery and of village life.

He said of a day at the Charmettes, a property near Chambery, with his beloved friend Madame de Warens, at the end of 1736:

'I arose with the sun and was happy; I walked and was happy; I saw Madame de Warens and was happy; I quitted her and still was happy. Whether I rambled through the woods, over the hills, or strolled along the valley; read, was idle, worked in the garden, or gathered fruits, happiness continually accompanied me.'

He offered his morning prayer from a hill-top, and in the evening, before he left, stooped to kiss the ground and the trees, gazing till they were out of sight at the places where he had been so happy.

At the Hermitage with Therese there was a similar idyll.

The most epoch—making event in European feeling for Nature was the appearance of La Nouvelle Heloise (1761). The book overflows with Rousseau's raptures about the Lake of Geneva. St Preux says:

'The nearer I drew to Switzerland, the greater were my emotions. That instant in which I discovered the Lake of Geneva from the heights of Jura, was a moment of ecstasy and rapture. The sight of my country, my beloved country, where a deluge of pleasure had overflowed my heart; the pure and wholesome air of the Alps, the gentle breeze of the country, more sweet than the perfumes of the East; that rich and fertile spot, that unrivalled landscape, the most beautiful that ever struck the eye of man, that delightful abode, to which I found nothing comparable in the vast tour of the globe; the mildness of the season, the serenity of the climate, a thousand pleasing recollections which recalled to my mind the pleasures I had enjoyed;—all these circumstances together threw me into a kind of transport which I cannot describe, and seemed to collect the enjoyment of my whole life into one happy moment.'

La Nouvelle Heloise shewed the world three things in quite a new light: the inner consciousness which was determined to give feeling its rights again, though well aware that 'a feeling heart is an unhappy gift from heaven'; the taste for solitude, 'all noble passions are formed in solitude'; and closely bound up with these, the love of romantic scenery, which it described for the first time in glowing language.

Such expressions as these of St Preux were unheard of at that time: 'I shall do my best to be free quickly, and able to wander at my ease in the wild places that to my mind make the charm of this country.' 'I am of opinion that this unfrequented country deserves the attention of speculative curiosity, and that it wants nothing to excite admiration but a skilful spectator'; and 'Nature seems desirous of hiding her real charms from the sight of men, because they are too little sensible of them, and disfigure them when within their reach; she flies from public places; it is on the tops of mountains, in the midst of forests, on desert islands, that she displays her most affecting charms.'

Rousseau certainly announced his views with all the fervour of a prophet proclaiming a newly-discovered truth. The sketch St Preux gives of the country that 'deserved a year's study,' in the twenty-third letter to Julia, is very poetic. He is ascending a rocky path when a new view breaks upon him:

One moment I beheld stupendous rocks hanging ruinous over my head; the next, I was enveloped in a drizzling cloud, which arose from a vast cascade that, dashing, thundered against the rocks below my feet. On one side a perpetual torrent opened to my view a yawning abyss, which my eyes could hardly fathom with safety; sometimes I was lost in the obscurity of a hanging wood, and then was greatly astonished with the sudden opening of a flowery plain.

He was always charmed by 'a surprising mixture of wild and cultivated Nature':

Here Nature seems to have a singular pleasure in acting contradictory to herself, so different does she appear in the same place in different aspects. Towards the east, the flowers of spring; to the south, the flowers of autumn; and northwards, the ice of winter. Add to that the illusions of vision, the tops of the mountains variously illumined, the harmonious mixture of light and shade....

After climbing, he reflects:

Upon the top of mountains, the air being subtle and pure, we respire with greater freedom, our bodies are more active, our minds more serene, our pleasures less ardent, and our passions much more moderate. Our meditations acquire a degree of sublimity from the grandeur of the objects around us. It seems as if, being lifted above all human society, we had left every low terrestrial sentiment behind.

He can find no words to express 'the amazing variety, magnitude, and beauty of a thousand stupendous objects, the pleasure of gazing at an entire new scene ... and beholding, as it were, another Nature and a new world.'

Earlier in the year he wrote his letters to Julia upon a block of stone in his favourite wild spot, and the wintry landscape harmonized with his feelings:

I run to and fro, climb the rocks and explore my whole district, and find everything as horrible without as I experienced it within. There is no longer any verdure to be seen, the grass is yellow and withered, the trees are stripped of their foliage, and the north-east blast heaps snow and ice around me. In short, the whole face of Nature appears as decayed to my outward senses as I myself from within am dead to hope and joy.

Julia, too, is enthusiastic about places, where 'no vestiges are seen of human toil, no appearance of studied and laborious art; every object presents only a view of the tender care of Nature, our common mother.'

When St Preux knows that she returns his love, his sympathy for Nature overflows:

I find the country more delightful, the verdure fresher and livelier, the air more temperate, and the sky more serene than ever I did before; even the feathered songsters seem to tune their tender throats with more harmony and pleasure; the murmuring rills invite to love-inspiring dalliance, while the blossoms of the vine regale me from afar with the choicest perfumes ... let us animate all Nature, which is absolutely dead without the genial warmth of love.

St Preux escorts his old love to the Meillerie, and it was with his description of this that Rousseau unrolled the full charm of mountain scenery, and opened the eyes of his readers to see it.

They were climbing a mountain top on the Savoy side of the lake:

This solitary spot formed a wild and desert nook, but full of those sorts of beauties which are only agreeable to susceptible minds, and appear horrible to others. A torrent, occasioned by the melting of the snow, rolled in a muddy stream within twenty paces of us, and carried dust, sand, and stones along with it, not without considerable noise. Behind us, a chain of inaccessible rocks divided the place where we stood from that part of the Alps which they call the Ice house.... Forests of gloomy fir trees afforded us a melancholy shade on the right, while on the left was a large wood of oak, beyond which the torrent issued; and beneath, that vast body of water which the lake forms in the bay of the Alps, parted us from the rich coast of the Pays de Vaud, crowning the whole landscape with the top of the majestic Jura.

Rousseau's influence upon feeling in general, and feeling for Nature in particular, was an extraordinary one, widening and deepening at once.

By his strong personal impulse he impelled it into more natural paths, and at the same time he discovered the power of the mountains.

He brought to flower the germ which had lain dormant in Hellenism and the Renaissance; and although his readers imbibed a sickly strain of morbid sentimentality with this passion for the new region of feeling, the total effect of his individuality and his idealism was to intensify their love for Nature. His feelings woke the liveliest echo, and it was not France alone who profited by the lessons he taught.

He was no mountaineer himself, but he pointed out the way, and others soon followed it. Saussure began his climbing in 1760, exploring the Alps with the indomitable spirit of the discoverer and the scientist's craving for truth. He ascended Mont Blanc in 1787, and only too soon the valleys of Chamounix filled with tourists and speculators. One of the first results of Rousseau's imposing descriptions of scenery was to rouse the most ardent of French romance writers, Bernardin de St Pierre; and his writings, especially his beautiful pictures of the Ile de France, followed hard in the wake of La Nouvelle Heloise.

In Paul and Virginia vivid descriptions of Nature were interwoven with an idyllic Robinson Crusoe romance:

Within this enclosure reigns the most profound silence. The waters, the air, all the elements are at peace. Scarcely does the echo repeat the whispers of the palm trees spreading their broad leaves, the long points of which are gently agitated by the winds. A soft light illumines the bottom of this deep valley, on which the sun shines only at noon. But even at break of day the rays of light are thrown on the surrounding rocks, and their sharp peaks, rising above the shadows of the mountain, appear like tints of gold and purple gleaming upon the azure sky.

Like Rousseau, St Pierre held that 'to take refuge in the wildest and most desert places is an instinct common to all feeling and suffering beings, as if rocks were ramparts against misfortune, and Nature's calm could appease the sorrows of the soul'[14]; but he differed in caring for Nature far more for her own sake, and not in opposition to culture and a detested world. He wrote too, not as a philosopher proclaiming a new gospel, but as a poet[15]; the poetry of Nature had been revealed to French literature.

St Pierre drew the beauty of the tropics in a poem, and George Forster's Voyage round the World[16] shewed how quickly Rousseau's influence told upon travels. It was a far cry from the Crusaders and discoverers to the highly-cultured Forster, alive to everything that was good and beautiful, and able to express it. He was the first to describe countries and peoples from both the scientific and artistic standpoint—a style of writing which Humboldt perfected, and some later writers, Haeckel, for example, in Indischen Briefen, have carried on with success.

To quote Forster:

The town of Santa Cruz in Madeira was abreast of us at six in the afternoon. The mountains are here intersected by numerous deep glens and valleys. On the sloping ground we observed several country houses pleasantly situated amidst surrounding vineyards and lofty cypresses, which gave the country altogether a romantic appearance. Early on the 29th we were agreeably surprised with the picturesque appearance of the city of Funchal....

In October 1772, off South Africa:

The night was scarcely begun when the water all round us afforded the most grand and astonishing sight that can be imagined. As far as we could see, the whole ocean seemed to be in a blaze. Every breaking wave had its summit illuminated by a light similar to that of phosphorus, and the sides of the vessel, coming in contact with the sea, were strongly marked by a luminous line.... There was a singularity and a grandeur in the display of this phenomenon which could not fail of giving occupation to the mind, and striking it with a reverential awe, due to omnipotence.

The ocean was covered to a great extent with myriads of animalcules; these little beings, organized, alive, endowed with locomotive power, a quality of shining whenever they please, of illuminating every body with which they come in contact ... all these ideas crowded upon us, and bade us admire the Creator, even in His minutest works.... I hope I shall not have formed too favourable an opinion of my readers, if I expect that the generality will sympathize with me in these feelings.

In Dusky Bay:

We glided along by insensible degrees, wafted by light airs past numerous rocky islands, each of which was covered with wood and shrubberies, where numerous evergreens were sweetly contrasted and mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired to complete our joy.

Cascade Cove in New Zealand:

This waterfall at a distance of a mile and a half seems to be but inconsiderable on account of its great elevation; but, after climbing about 200 yards upwards, we ... found a view of great beauty and grandeur before us. The first object which strikes the beholder is a clear column of water eight or ten yards in circumference, which is projected with great impetuosity from the perpendicular rock at the height of 100 yards. Nearly at the fourth part of the whole height this column meeting a part of the same rock, which now acquires a little inclination, spreads on its broad back into a limpid sheet of about twenty-five yards in width. Here its surface is curled, and dashes upon every little eminence in its rapid descent, till it is all collected in a fine basin about sixty yards in circuit, included on three sides by the natural walls of the rocky chasm, and in front by huge masses of stone irregularly piled above each other. Between them the stream finds its way, and runs foaming with the greatest rapidity along the slope of the hill to the sea. The whole neighbourhood of the cascade ... is filled with a steam or watery vapour.... We ... were struck with the sight of a most beautiful rainbow of a perfectly circular form, produced by the meridian rays of the sun refracted in the vapour of the cascade.

The scenery on the left consists of steep brown rocks fringed on the summits with overhanging shrubs and trees; the enchanting melody of various birds resounded on all sides, and completed the beauty of this wild and romantic spot.

He described: 'A waterspout, a phenomenon which carried so much terrific majesty in it, and connected, as it were, the sea with the clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss how to behave.'

He begins his diary of August 1773 with O'Taheite:

It was one of those beautiful mornings which the poets of all nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of O'Taheite within two miles before us. The east wind, which had carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface of the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of the rising sun ... everything seemed as yet asleep; the morning scarce dawned, and a peaceful shade still rested on the landscape....

This spot was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and could not fail of bringing to remembrance the most fanciful descriptions of poets, which it eclipsed in beauty; we had a prospect of the plain below us, and of the sea beyond it. In the shade of trees, whose branches hung over the water, we enjoyed a pleasant gale, which softened the heat of the day; and, amidst the solemn uniform noise of the waterfall, which was but seldom interrupted by the whistling of birds, we sat down....

We could have been well pleased to have passed the whole day in this retirement ... however, feasting our eyes once more with the romantic scenery, we returned to the plain.

It was such descriptions as these which stimulated Humboldt. There is a breath of poetry in his writings; his Views of Nature and Cosmos give ample proof that love of Nature and knowledge of Nature can condition and deepen each other.

It is not surprising that in the flood of scientific 'Travels' which followed, especially in imitation of Forster, there were some that laid claim to a wonderful grade of feeling. For example, the description of a day at the Equator by von Spix and v. Martius in their Travels in Brazil in 1817 to 1820:

In these seas the sun rises from the ocean with great splendour, and gilds the clouds accumulated in the horizon, which in grand and various groups seem to present to the eye of the spectator continents with high mountains and valleys, with volcanoes and seas, mythological and other strange creations of fancy.

The lamp of day gradually rises in the transparent blue sky; the damp grey fogs subside; the sea is calm or gently rises and falls, with a surface smooth as a mirror, in a regular motion. At noon a pale, faintly shining cloud rises, the herald of a sudden tempest, which at once disturbs the tranquillity of the sea. Thunder and lightning seem as if they would split our planet; but a heavy rain of a salt taste, pouring down in the midst of roaring whirlwinds, puts an end to the raging of the elements, and several semi-circular rainbows, extended over the ocean like gay triumphal arches, announce the peaceful termination of the great natural phenomenon. As soon as the air and sea have recovered their equilibrium, the sky again shews its transparent azure.... As the sun gradually sinks in the clouded horizon, the sea and sky assume a new dress, which is beyond description sublime and magnificent. The most brilliant red, yellow, violet, in infinite shades and contrasts, are poured out in profusion over the azure of the firmament, and are reflected in still gayer variety from the surface of the water. The day departs amid continued lightning on the dusky horizon, while the moon in silent majesty rises from the unbounded ocean into the cloudless upper regions. Variable winds cool the atmosphere; numerous falling stars, coming particularly from the south, shed a magic light; the dark-blue firmament, reflected with the constellations on the untroubled bosom of the water, represents the image of the wholly starry hemisphere; and the ocean, agitated even by the faintest breeze of the night, is changed into a sea of waving fire.... The variety of the light and foliage of the trees, which is seen in the forests, on the slopes of the mountains: the blending of the most diverse colours, and the dark azure and transparency of the sky, impart to the landscapes of the tropical countries a charm to which even the pencil of a Salvator Rosa and a Claude cannot do justice....

Except at noon, when all living creatures in the torrid zone seek shade and repose, and when a solemn silence is diffused over the scene, illumined by the dazzling beams of the sun, every hour of the day calls into action another race of animals.... When the sun goes down, most of the animals retire to rest ... myriads of luminous beetles now begin to fly about like ignes fatui, and the blood-sucking bats hover like phantoms in the profound darkness of the night.... The traveller does not here meet with the impressions of those sublime and rugged high Alps of Europe, nor, on the other hand, those of a meaner nature; but the character of these landscapes combines grandeur with simplicity and softness....

He who has not personally experienced the enchantment of tranquil moonlight nights in these happy latitudes can never be inspired, even by the most faithful description, with those feelings which scenes of such wondrous beauty excite in the mind of the beholder.

A delicate transparent mist hangs over the country, the moon shines brightly amid heavy and singularly grouped clouds, the outlines of the objects illuminated by it are clear and well defined, while a magic twilight seems to remove from the eye those which are in shade. Scarce a breath of air is stirring, and the neighbouring mimosas, that have folded up their leaves to sleep, stand motionless beside the dark crowns of the manga, the jaca, and the ethereal jambos; or sometimes a sudden wind arises and the juiceless leaves of the acaju rustle, the richly flowered grumijama and pitanga let drop a fragrant shower of snow-white blossoms; the crowns of the majestic palms wave slowly over the silent roof which they overshade, like a symbol of peace and tranquillity.

Shrill cries of the cicada, the grasshopper, and tree frog make an incessant hum, and produce by their monotony a pleasing melancholy.... Every half-hour different balsamic odours fill the air, and other flowers alternately unfold their leaves to the night.... While the silent vegetable world, illuminated by scores of fireflies as by a thousand moving stars, charms the night by its delicate effluvia, brilliant lightnings play incessantly on the horizon, and elevate the mind in joyful admiration to the stars, which, glowing in solemn silence in the firmament above the continent and ocean, fill the soul with a presentiment of still sublimer wonders.

Travels by sea were described at much greater length and with much more effusion than travels by land; one might infer from the silence of the people who moved about in Europe in the eighteenth century, that no love of Nature existed. The extreme discomfort of the road up to a hundred years ago may account for this silence within Germany.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1716 of Saxon Switzerland:

We passed by moonshine the frightful precipices that divide Bohemia from Saxony, at the bottom of which runs the river Elbe ... in many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern an inch of space between the wheels and the precipice....

and her husband declared that

he had passed the Alps five times in different places, without having gone a road so dangerous.

Scherr relates that in the late autumn of 1721 a citizen of Schwabisch-Gmuend travelled to Ellwangen, a distance of eight hours' posting.

Before starting, he had a mass performed in St John's Church 'for the safe conclusion of the coming journey.' He set off one Monday with his wife and a maid in a two-horse vehicle called a small tilt waggon (Planwaegelchen), but in less than an hour the wheels stuck in mud, and the whole party had to get out and push the carriage, up to their knees in filth. In the middle of the village of Boebingen the driver inadvertently drove the front left wheel into a manure hole, the carriage was overturned, and the lady of the party had her nose and cheek badly grazed by the iron hoops.

From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, and yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend the night there. Next morning they set off early, and reached the village of Hofen by mid-day without accidents. Here for a time the travelling ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the carriage fell into a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the maid's right shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant's hand injured. The axle of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse completely lamed in the left forefoot. They had to put up a second time for the night, leave horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, and hire a rack waggon, in which at last, pitifully shaken, they reached the gates of Ellwangen on Wednesday at vesper bells.

When Eva Koenig, Lessing's fiancee, was on her way from Brunswick to Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf (two miles north of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows:

You will certainly never in your life have heard of a village called Rattelsdorf? We have been in it already twenty-four hours, and who knows if we shall not have to stay four times as long! It depends on the Maine, whether it falls or not; as it is now, one could not cross it, even if one dared to. I have never in my life met with so many hindrances, so many dangers and hardships, as on this journey. I can hardly think of any misfortunes which we have not already had.

She goes on to describe that in thirty-eight hours two axles and two poles had been broken, the horses had bolted with them, one horse had fallen and died, and so on; on March 2nd they were still prisoners in the wretched village.

In 1750 a day's journey was still reckoned at five miles, two hours to the mile; and when in July 1750 Klopstock travelled with Gleim from Halberstadt to Magdeburg in a light carriage drawn by four horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of travelling on foot—the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and admire the scenery was an unknown thing. (G. Freytag.)

It was only after the widening of thoroughfares, the invention of steamboats (the first was on the Weser 1827) and railways (1835), that travelling became commoner and more popular, and feeling for Nature was thereby increased.

After the Swiss Alps had been discovered for them, people began to feel interest in their native mountains; Zimmermann led the way with his observations on a journey in the Harz 1775, and Gatterer in 1785 published A Guide to Travelling in the Harz in five volumes.

In 1806 appeared Nicolas's Guide to Switzerland, in 1777 J.T. Volkmar's Journey to the Riesengebirge, and before long each little country and province, be it Weimar, Mecklenburg, or the Mark, had discovered a Switzerland within its own boundaries, with mountains as much like the Swiss Alps as a charming little girl is like a giant.

It was the opening of men's eyes to the charms of romantic scenery at home.

The Isle of Ruegen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]—so much so, in fact, that in 1805 Gruembke was complaining that many people only went there to feast, not to enjoy the scene:

You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should find a place—the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either alone or with intimate and congenial friends.



CHAPTER XII

THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF MODERN TIMES

The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and Goettingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and La Nouvelle Heloise, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and freed it from convention!

It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he felt became a poem, what he saw a picture.

To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus—nymphs, Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr—even the still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, without lyric thought and feeling.

But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder.

Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of poetry and painting in Laocoon, he attacked the error of his day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of seasons, places, plants, etc.

He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said:

Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

And against descriptive poetry he said:

When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast made up of sauces.

Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical acumen was not at home.

But his discussions established the position that external objects of any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer and inner world.

Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention which had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in succeeding days.

The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[2] he said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The different parts of the song are no more connected together than the trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes depicted.' In another place[3] he put the history of feeling for Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their finest minutiae, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's Alps, Kleist's poems and Gessner's, Thomson's Seasons, speak for themselves.'

He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and beautiful in the Moralists, and translated it[4]; in fact, in Herder we have already an aesthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.

After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., Nature's influence on man, moral and aesthetic, became, as we have already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces of any aesthetic analysis.

The most important one was Kant's, in his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the beautiful.

Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful.

He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees cut into shapes, as beautiful.

Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful stimulates.

He goes on to subdivide the sublime:

This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the second the noble, the third the splendid sublime.

Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental.

He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely:

The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called romantic.

In his Kalligone, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says, 'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and movement.'

And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea.

His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight into her relation to the poet soul of the people:

Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us—then we feel Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and become alive (and give life—inspire), I inhale fragrance and exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the blue sky; I feel all these feelings.

Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his song.[7] 'I greet thee, thou wing of heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the rainbow, 'Beautiful child of the sun, picture and hope over dark clouds ... hopes are colours, are broken sun-rays and the children of tears, truth is the sun.'

In By the Sea at Naples he wrote:

A-weary of the summer's fiery brand, I sat me down beside the cooling sea, Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand Of the grey shore, ... And over me, high over in the air, Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ... Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful, The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams.

In Recollections of Naples:

Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay! Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill, Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun In the blue water—thou hast passed away!

and

When the glow of evening softly fades From the still sea, and with her gleaming host The moon ascends the sky.

Night is very poetic:

And comest thou again, Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts? Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou? The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff, Her flowers bend low their heads; And with them, satiate with vision, droops My overcharged soul.... O starry goddess with the crown of gold, Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam A thousand worlds ... Silence divine, that filleth all the world, Flowing so softly to the eternal shores Of an eternal universe....

And in St John's Night, he exclaims:

Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!

Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his day. His correspondence with his fiancee shews this[8]; one sees Rousseau's influence:

My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming wood close to Bueckeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the nightingale.

I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.

And his fiancee wrote:

'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems beautiful to me.

and

I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.

and

Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield without stroking them.

Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.

His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.

While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of modern times was reflected.

He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from boyhood up, as he said in Wahrheit und Dichtung, he had 'a warm feeling for all objective things.'

No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close and original observation of Nature.

He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:

His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder height.'

'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast to possess thee.'

'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'

'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'

The stars move 'with flower feet.'

The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of earth.'

A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground.

In Stella:

Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.

I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.

In Faust:

The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.

When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world perishing with him:

The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future.

These are among his still more numerous metaphors:

A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. Iphigenia says to Orestes:

O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame and cool it.

and Eleonora complains about Tasso:

Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder.

In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around.

May Song, On the Lake, Ganymede, are instances of this.

Ganymede:

Oh, what a glow Around me in morning's Blaze thou diffusest, Beautiful spring! With the rapture of love but intenser, Intenser and deeper and sweeter, Nestles and creeps to my heart The sensation divine Of thy fervour eternal, Oh, thou unspeakably fair!

Beautiful personifications abound:

The sun is proudly throned in heaven.

The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery love,

Or bathes like the moon in the ocean.

The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes.

'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its footsteps.'

'The young day arose with delight.'

The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my abode.'

On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung on the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully out of the mist.'

'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.'

Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying earth its deep springs.'

The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams gloomily to the abyss.'

With gradual step from out the far-off grey, Self-heralded draws on the storm. Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down, And seamen hasten to reef in the sail Before its stubborn wrath.

His flowers are alive:

The beauteous snowdrops Droop o'er the plain, The crocus opens Its glowing bud ... With saucy gesture Primroses flare, And roguish violets Hidden with care.

But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig[9]:

You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed my soul with a certain sadness.

This solitary joy is mine, When far apart from all mankind, By shady brook-side to recline. And keep my loved ones in my mind....

He goes on with these lines:

Then is my heart with sorrow filled, Sad is mine eye. The flooded brook now rages by, That heretofore so gently rilled. No bird sings in the bushes now, The tree so green is dry, The zephyr which on me did blow So cheering, now storms northerly, And scattered blossoms bears on high.

He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier poems[10] shew prevalent taste, the allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for instance, in Night; but they are followed by lines which are all his own.

He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and Nature together.

Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is Nature.' He thinks of her

When the bright sunlight shimmers Across the sea, When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.

Thou art seductive and charming; flowers, Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.

There is passionate feeling for Nature in the May Song of his Sesenheimer period:

How gloriously gleameth All Nature to me! How bright the sun beameth, How fresh is the lea! White blossoms are bursting The thickets among, And all the gay greenwood Is ringing with song! There's radiance and rapture That nought can destroy, Oh earth, in thy sunshine, Oh heart, in thy joy. Oh love! thou enchanter So golden and bright, Like the red clouds of morning That rest on yon height, It is them that art clothing The fields and the bowers, And everywhere breathing The incense of flowers.

Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said (Wahrheit und Dichtung): 'Her figure never looked more charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace he wrote:

One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near her.

and one of the poems to Frederica says:

The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness.

There is a strong pulse of life—life that overflows into Nature—in The Departure:

To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep, Into the saddle blithe I spring; The eve was cradling earth to sleep, And night upon the mountains hung. With robes of mist around him set, The oak like some huge giant stood, While, with its hundred eyes of jet, Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood. Amid a bank of clouds the moon A sad and troubled glimmer shed; The wind its chilly wings unclosed, And whistled wildly round my head. Night framed a thousand phantoms dire, Yet did I never droop nor start; Within my veins what living fire! What quenchless glow within my heart!

And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which begins, 'A tender, youthful trouble.'

He tells in Wahrheit und Dichtung how he found comfort for his love troubles in Frankfort:

They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the mind, which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the heights, in the fields, and in the woods, the situation of Frankfort was serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new world was revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... For this new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, to his enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a splendid Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued in movement late into the night.... The full moon rising from the clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the scenes of Ossian just present to our minds.

His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli:

(If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?)

and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature.

There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its being in Nature as Werther.[11] In Wahrheit und Dichtung Goethe said of the 'strange element' in which Werther was designed and written:

I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations as they extended on all sides.

The strong influence of La Nouvelle Heloise upon Werther was very evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not the keen poetic vision.

Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to his nation, and by virtue of which in Werther, the outer world, the scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a work of art, Werther is excellent, La Nouvelle Heloise is not. Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits—a faculty which only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him.

The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and feeling—and what at that time was not?—was repugnant to Werther; what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and uneducated people.

Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is too late to repair it.

To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no role at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's truest and most intimate friend.

Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way, with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a brilliant youth.

Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the 'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination of the heart' illuminates Nature round him—his 'favourite valley,' the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own breast.

When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!

O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under the weight of the grandeur of these visions.

Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery delighted him—the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees.

When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can imitate without affectation.

With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased; on July 24th he wrote:

I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass.

Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature a tormentor:

August 18.—Must it ever be thus, that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all nature budding and bursting around—the hills clothed from foot to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their varied windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the sky—when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me—all this displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all Nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fulness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of an infinite universe became visible to my soul.... From the inaccessible mountains across the desert, which no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator, and every atom to which He has given existence finds favour in His sight. Ah! how often at that time has the flight of a bird soaring above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasure of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature—Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself and every object near it; so that, surrounded by earth, and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart, and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.... If in such moments I find no sympathy ... I either wander through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, or force a path through the trackless thicket, where I am lacerated and torn by thorns and briars, and thence I find relief.