My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love.
His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas, that Kleist could write to Gleim[[5]]: 'The odes please me more the more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault, too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.'
Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French style[[6]] far less than the others--than Hagedorn, for example; and though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[[7]] but with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness.
In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he wrote:
Lie down in early spring on yon green moss,
By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke,
My brother....
Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above,
So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks
In distant wood, near plain and careless glade,