CHAPTER XII

[1]: Comp. Gottschall, Poetik. Breslau, 1853.

[2]: Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, Sämtliche Werke, Teil 7.

[3]: Op. cit., Teil 15.

[4]: Zur Philosophie und Gesehichte, 2 Teil.

[5]: J.G. Sulzer's Unterredungen über die Schönheit der Nätur nebst desselben moralischen Betrachtungen über besondere Gegenstände der Naturlehre is typical. Charites describes his conversion to the love of Nature by his friend Eukrates. Eukrates woke him at dawn and led him to a hill close by, as the sun rose. The fresh air, the birds' songs, and the wide landscape move him, and Eukrates points out that the love of Nature is the 'most natural of pleasures,' making the labourer so happy that he forgets servitude and misery, and sings at his work. 'This pleasure is always new to us, and the heart, provided it be not possessed by vanity or stormy passions, lies always open to it. Do you not know that they who are in trouble, and, above all, they who are in love, find their chief relief here? Is not a sick man better cheered by sunshine than by any other refreshment?' Then he points out Nature's harmonies and changes of colour, and warns Charites to avoid the storms of the passions. 'Yonder brook is a picture of our soul; so long as it runs quietly between its banks, the water is clear and grass and flowers border it; but when it swells and flows tumultuously, all this ornament is torn away, and it becomes turbid. To delight in Nature the mind must be free.... She is a sanctity only approached by pure souls.... As only the quiet stream shews the sky and the objects around, so it is only on quiet souls that Nature's pictures are painted; ruffled water reflects nothing.' He waxes eloquent about birds' songs, flowers, and brooks, and wanders by the hour in the woods, 'all his senses open to Nature's impressions,' which are 'rays from that source of all beauty, the sight of which will one day bless the soul.' His friend is soon convinced that Nature cannot be overpraised, and that her art is endlessly great.

[6]: Vorn Gefühl des Schönen und Physiologie überhaupt. Winter.

[7]: Comp. Das Fluchtigste. 'Tadle nicht der Nachtigallen, Bald verhallend süsses Lied,' oder 'Nichts verliert sich,' etc.

[8]: Herder's Nachlass, Düntzer und F.G. von Herder, 1857.

[9]: Bernay's Der junge Goethe.

[10]: Die Sprödde, Die Bekehrte, März, Lust und Qual, Luna, Gegenwart.

[11]: Laprade is all admiration for the 'incomparable artiste et poëte inspiré du sentiment de la Nature, c'est qu'il excelle à peindre le monde extérieur et le coeur humain l'un par l'autre, qu'il mêle les images de l'univers visible à l'expression des sentiments intimes, de manière à n'en former qu'un seul tissu.... Tous les éléments d'un objet d'une situation apparaissent à la fois, et dans leur harmonie, essentielle à cet incomparable esprit.' He is astonished at the symbolism in Werthtr: 'Chaque lettre répond à la saison ou elle est écrite.... l'idee et l'image s'identifient dans un fait suprême, dans un cri; il se fait entre l'émotion intime et l'impression du dehors une sorte de fusion.' And despite Goethe's Greek paganism and pantheism, he declares: 'Le nom de Goethe marque une de ces grandes dates, une de ces grandes révolutions de la poésie--la plus grande, nous le croyons, depuis Homer.' ... 'Goethe est la plus haut expression poétique des tendances de notre siècle vers le monde extérieur et la philosophie de la Nature.'

[12]: Comp. Tagebucher und Briefe Goethe's aus Italien an Frau von Stein und Herder. E. Schmidt, Weimar, 1886.

[13]: Julian Schmidt.

[14]: The Lady of the Lake breathes a delightful freshness, the very spirit of mountain and wood, free alike from the moral preaching of Wordsworth, and from the storms of passion.

[15]: Laprade.

[16]: 'Sa formule réligieuse, c'est une question; sa pensée, c'est le doute ... l'artiste divinise chaque détail. Son panthéisme ne s'applique pas seulement à l'ensemble des choses; Dieu tout entier est réellement présent poor lui dans chaque fragment de matière dans le plus immonde animal ... c'est une réligion aussi vieille que l'humanité décline; cela s'appelle purement et simplement le fétichisme.' (Laprade.)

[17]: Vorschule der Æsthetik. Compare 'With every genius a new Nature is created for us in the further unveiling of the old.' 2 Aufi. Berlin Reimer, 1827.

[18]: 'Like a lily softly swaying in the hushed air, so my being moves in its elements, in the charming dream of her.' 'Our souls rush forward in colossal plans, like exulting streams rushing perpetually through mountain and forest.' 'If the old mute rock of Fate did not stand opposing them, the waves of the heart would never foam so beautifully and become mind.' 'There is a night in the soul which no gleam of starlight, not even dry wood, illuminates,' etc.

[19]: Comp. Tieck's Biographie von Koepke. Brandes.

[20]: Franz Sternbald, I. Berlin, 1798.

[21]: Haym, Die romantische Schule. Berlin, 1870.

[22]: Phantasus, i. Berlin, 1812.

[23]: 'A young hunter was sitting in the heart of the mountains in a thoughtful mood beside his fowling-piece, while the noise of the water and the woods was sounding through the solitude ... it grew darker ... the birds of night began to shoot with fitful wing along their mazy courses ... unthinkingly he pulled a straggling root from the earth, and on the instant heard with affright a stifled moan underground, which winded downwards in doleful tones, and died plaintively away in the deep distance. The sound went through his inmost heart; it seized him as if he had unwittingly touched the wound, of which the dying frame of Nature was expiring in its agony.' (Runenberg.)

[24]: Hymnen an die Nacht.

[25]: In Die Lehrlinge von Sais.

[26]: Athenäum, iii., 1800.

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