His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.
While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of modern times was reflected.
He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from boyhood up, as he said in Wahrheit und Dichtung, he had 'a warm feeling for all objective things.'
No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close and original observation of Nature.
He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:
His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder height.'
'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast to possess thee.'
'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'
'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'
The stars move 'with flower feet.'