Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!

Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his day. His correspondence with his fiancée shews this[[8]]; one sees Rousseau's influence:

My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming wood close to Bückeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the nightingale.

I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.

And his fiancée wrote:

'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems beautiful to me.

and

I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.

and

Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield without stroking them.

Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.