'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously, grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.'
There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this:
'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell to you!
'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!'
But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.
There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as Montreux, Schãferei von der schönen Juliana, since 1595; Urfé's Astrée and Montemayor's Diana appeared in 1619, and Sidney's Arcadia ten years later.
Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as Daphne, Galatea, Corydon, and Asteria, his Schãferei von der 'Nymphen Hercinie.'
His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn began to shew herself and everything with her....
'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort me.'
He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, river, and spring.'