Meet side by side in leafy trees.

Peering through the leaves with joy

We notice, as we see the leaves

Lighted from one side only,

That we can almost see the sun

Mixing gold with the tender green, etc.

and so on for another twenty lines.

Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to Ueber das Firmament:

As lately in the sapphire depths,

Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end,