And radiant is heaven,
Whilst Æolus loosens
Our anguish-fraught bond.
The most perfect of all such short poems was the Evening Song, written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is great and simple--the sun down.'
Every tree top is at peace.
E'en the rustling woods do cease
Every sound;
The small birds sleep on every bough.
Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou
Sleep in peace.
The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in so many words in the Night Song; but it is all there, like the united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.)
The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works them into one tissue. Taken alone with The Fisher and To the Moon, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of Nature.
He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.
But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his religion. In his youth, in the period of Werther, Ganymede, and the first part of Faust, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, 'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let him down upon inaccessible rocks.'
After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon everything about living things will be clear to me.'[[13]]
Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling.