Chapter XII (1)

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 Göttingen 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 Héloise_, 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 minutiæ, 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 æsthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.

After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., Nature's influence on man, moral and æsthetic, 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 æsthetic 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 _fiancée_ shews this[8]; one sees Rousseau's influence:

My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming
wood close to Bückeburg, 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 _fiancée_ 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 Héloise_ 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 Héloise_ 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 _rôle_ 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.

Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had been to him:

I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to
me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither....

the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock):

_September_ 10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my
remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled
with thoughts of death and futurity.

Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoôn] of Euripides, Petrarch's _dolendi voluptas_--the _Wonne der Wehmuth_.

On September 4th he wrote:

It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes
autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and
the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage.

It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say:

Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the
illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds,
surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of
the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the
mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds
issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no
sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more
refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my
brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life,
that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it
is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and
behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and
illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in
silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows
which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all
her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are
ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart....

On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by the river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of Ossian:

Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind
blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the
plain.

and in the dreadful night of the flood:

Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful
sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the
moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded
together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake
which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone
forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous
torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand
impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and
delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss,
and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the
intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a
plunge into that gulf.

To his farewell letter he adds:

Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your
lover, draws near his end.

The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of _Faust_, when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos:

How all things live and work, and ever blending,
Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range!
How powers celestial, rising and descending,
Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange.
Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing.

And the Earth spirit says:

In the currents of life, in action's storm,
I float and I wave
With billowy motion,--
Birth and the grave
A limitless ocean.

Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said:

Inscrutable in broadest light,
To be unveiled by force she doth refuse.

But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness:

Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now
For the last time upon my troubled brow!

and

Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills
In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow,
Hope's budding promise every valley fills.
And winter, spent with age, and powerless now,
Draws off his forces to the savage hills.

and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of longing:

In the rich sunset see how brightly glow
Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green.
Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more;
Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light.
Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar,
And after, ever after him to strive!
Then should I see the world outspread below,
Illumined by the deathless evening beams,
The vales reposing, every height aglow,
The silver brooklets meeting golden streams....
Alas! that when on Spirit wing we rise,
No wing material lifts our mortal clay.
But 'tis our inborn impulse, deep and strong,
To rush aloft, to struggle still towards heaven,
When far above us pours its thrilling song
The skylark lost amid the purple even,
When on extended pinion sweeps amain
The lordly eagle o'er the pine-crowned height.
And when, still striving towards its home, the crane
O'er moor and ocean wings its onward flight.

But the most complete expression of Goethe's attitude, not only in the period of _Werther_ and the first part of _Faust_, but generally, is contained in the _Monologue_, which was probably written not earlier than the spring of 1788:

Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not vainly hast thou turn'd
To me thy countenance in flaming fire;
Thou gav'st me glorious Nature for my realm,
And also power to feel her and enjoy;
Not merely with a cold and wond'ring glance,
Thou didst permit me in her depths profound,
As in the bosom of a friend, to gaze;
Before me thou dost lead her living tribes,
And dost in silent grove, in air and stream,
Teach me to know my kindred....

His feeling was not admiration alone, nor reverence alone, but the sympathy of _Childe Harold_:

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? Should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these?

and the very confession of faith of such poetic pantheism is in Faust's words:

Him who dare name,
And yet proclaim,
Yes, I believe?...
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Doth he not embrace, sustain
Thee, me, himself?
Lifts not the heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?
And beaming tenderly with looks of love,
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?

The poems which date directly after the Wetzlar period are full of this sympathetic pantheistic love for Nature--_Mahomet's Song_, for example, with its splendid comparison of pioneering genius to a mountain torrent:

Ho! the spring that bursts
From the mountain height
Joyous and bright,
As the gleam of a star....
Down in the vale below
Flowers bud beneath his tread ...
And woo him with fond eyes.
And the streamlets of the mountains
Shout to him, and cry out 'Brother'!
Brother! take thy brothers with thee,
With thee to thine ancient father,
To the eternal Ocean,
Who with outstretch'd arms awaits us....
And so beareth he his brothers
To their primal sire expectant,
All his bosom throbbing, heaving,
With a wild, tumultuous joy.

We see the same pathos--the pathos of Pindar and the Psalms--in the comparison:

Like water is the soul of man,
From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes,
And back again to earth in ceaseless change.

in the incomparable _Wanderer_, in _Wanderer's Storm Song,_ and, above all, in _Ganymede_, already given, of which Loeper remarks:

The poem is, as it were, a rendering of that letter (Werther's of
May 10th) in rhythm. The underlying pantheism had already shewn
itself in the _Wanderer's Storm Song_. It was not the delight in
God of a Brockes, not the adoration of a Klopstock, not sesthetic
enjoyment of Nature, not, as in later years, scientific interest;
it was rather a being absorbed in, identified with, Nature, a
sympathy carried so far that the very ego was surrendered to the
elements.

On the Lake of Zurich he wrote, June 15th, 1775:

And here I drink new blood, fresh food,
From world so free, so blest;
How sweet is Nature and how good,
Who holds me to her breast.

and Elmire sings in _Ermin and Elmire_:

From thee, O Nature, with deep breath
I drink in painful pleasure.

One of the gems among his Nature poems is _Autumn Feelings_ (it was the autumn of his love for Lilli):

Flourish greener as ye clamber,
O ye leaves, to seek my chamber;
Up the trellised vine on high
May ye swell, twin-berries tender,
Juicier far, and with more splendour
Ripen, and more speedily.
O'er ye broods the sun at even,
As he sinks to rest, and heaven
Softly breathes into your ear
All its fertilizing fulness,
While the moon's refreshing coolness,
Magic-laden, hovers near.
And alas! ye're watered ever
By a stream of tears that rill
From mine eyes--tears ceasing never,
Tears of love that nought can still.

The lyrical effect here depends upon the blending of a single impression of Nature with the passing mood--an occasional poem rare even for Goethe.

In a letter to Frau von Stein he admitted that he was greatly influenced by Nature:

I have slept well and am quite awake, only a quiet sadness lies
upon my soul.... The weather agrees exactly with my state of
mind, and I begin to believe that it is the weather around me
which has the most immediate effect upon me, and the great world
thrills my little one with her own mood.

Again, _To the Moon_, in the spring 1778, expresses perfect communion between Nature and feeling:

Flooded are the brakes and dells
With thy phantom light,
And my soul receives the spell
Of thy mystic night.
To the meadow dost thou send
Something of thy grace,
Like the kind eye of a friend
Beaming on my face.
Echoes of departed times
Vibrate in mine ear,
Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes,
As I wander here.
Flow, flow on, thou little brook,
Ever onward go!
Trusted heart and tender look
Left me even so!
Richer treasure earth has none
Than I once possessed--
Ah! so rich, that when 'twas gone
Worthless was the rest.
Little brook! adown the vale
Rush and take my song:
Give it passion, give it wail,
As thou leap'st along!
Sound it in the winter night
When thy streams are full,
Murmur it when skies are bright
Mirror'd in the pool.
Happiest he of all created
Who the world can shun,
Not in hate, and yet unhated,
Sharing thought with none,
Save one faithful friend, revealing
To his kindly ear
Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing,
Make the night so drear.

In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm:

This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about
it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars,
which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring.

To the same year belongs _The Fisher_, which gave such melodious voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, 'the moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, _The Erlking_, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding.

Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year he went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.' His love for Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the _Werther_ period, gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more temperate.

This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from _Werther_, and his mind was too agitated for quiet observation:

Hasten thee, Kronos!...
Over stock and stone let thy trot
Into life straightway lead....
Wide, high, glorious the view
Gazing round upon life,
While from mount unto mount
Hovers the spirit eterne,
Life eternal foreboding....

Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in 1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye could not grasp it.'

He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, and these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, and were partly mixed with them.

From Selz:

An uncommonly fine day, a happy country--still all green, only
here and there a yellow beech or oak leaf. Meadows still in their
silver beauty--a soft welcome breeze everywhere. Grapes improving
with every step and every day. Every peasant's house has a vine
up to the roof, and every courtyard a great overhanging arbour.
The air of heaven soft, warm, and moist. The Rhine and the clear
mountains near at hand, the changing woods, meadows, fields like
gardens, do men good, and give me a kind of comfort which I have
long lacked.

The pen remains as ever the pen of a poet, but he looks at Switzerland now with a mature, settled taste, analyzing his impressions, and studying mountains, glaciers, boulders, scientifically.

Of the Staubbach Fall, near Lauterbrunnen (Oct. 9th, 1779):

The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came through.
Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top where
the Staubbach falls over, was lightly covered. It was a very
noble sight ... then the clouds came down into the valley and
covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water
falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on.... In the
Munsterthal, through which we came, everything was lofty, but
more within the mind's power of comprehension than these. In
comparison with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too
small.

And after visiting the Berne glacier from Thun (Oct. 14):

It is difficult to write after all this ... the first glance from
the mountain is striking, the district is surprisingly extensive
and pleasant ... the road indescribably beautiful ... the view
from the Lake of Brienz towards the snow mountains at sunset is
great.

More eloquent is the letter of October 3rd, from the Munsterthal:

The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm
emotion. The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul,
which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can
feel. How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the
very highest without overflowing. My eye and my soul were both
able to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied
by nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their
impression, they had on me their full and natural effect. When we
compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we
laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every
nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to
patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind
from its own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor
expedient, after all, the latter is....

When we see such objects as these for the first time, the
unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a
sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the
mind and draws from us the most delicious tears.... If only
destiny had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand
scenery, then would I every morning have imbibed greatness from
its grandeur, as from a lonely valley I would extract patience
and repose.

One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these
singular forms.... These masses must have been formed grandly and
simply by aggregation. Whatever revolutions may subsequently have
up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly
commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of
the masses.... One feels deeply convinced that here there is
nothing accidental, that here there is working an eternal law
which, however slowly, yet surely governs the universe.

By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up the Dole:

The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before
us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one
by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ... Vevey.... There are no
words to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the
line of glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back
again to the mountains.

From Cluse he wrote:

The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of
September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many
of the trees still green; most of them had assumed a
brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops
were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a
rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were
combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the
landscape.

At Chamouni, about effects of light: