Eat into caverns by the restless wave
And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice
That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare.
The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in Winter:
Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year!
How mighty, how majestic, are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul
That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings!
Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated the Seasons, when he had finished his Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138 verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74, while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length; and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together, but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional sort. He says himself[[7]] that he took up the study of poetry first as an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same time.'