Alfred Biese

“ These Idylls are the fruits of some of my happiest hours; of those hours when imagination and tranquillity shed their sweetest influence over me, and, excluding all which belongs to the period in which we live, recalled all the charms and delights of the Golden Age. A noble and well-regulated mind dwells with pleasure on these images of calm tranquillity and uninterrupted happiness, and the scenes in which the poet delineates the simple beauties of uncorrupted nature are endeared to us by the resemblance we fancy we perceive in them to the most blissful moments that we nave ourselves enjoyed. ”

“ Do you not know that they who are in trouble, and, above all, they who are in love, find their chief relief here? Is not a sick man better cheered by sunshine than by any other refreshment?' Then he points out Nature's harmonies and changes of colour, and warns Charites to avoid the storms of the passions. 'Yonder brook is a picture of our soul; so long as it runs quietly between its banks, the water is clear and grass and flowers border it; but when it swells and flows tumultuously, all this ornament is torn away, and it becomes turbid. To delight in Nature the mind must be free.... ”

“ But even at break of day the rays of light are thrown on the surrounding rocks, and their sharp peaks, rising above the shadows of the mountain, appear like tints of gold and purple gleaming upon the azure sky.
Like Rousseau, St Pierre held that 'to take refuge in the wildest and most desert places is an instinct common to all feeling and suffering beings, as if rocks were ramparts against misfortune, and Nature's calm could appease the sorrows of the soul' [14] ; but he differed in caring for Nature far more for her own sake, and not in opposition to culture and a detested world. ”

“ Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in Hamlet, breathe the bracing Highland air in Macbeth, the air of the woods in As You Like It; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside Julia's window. ”

“ Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the Carlovingian Renaissance never reached; they are mediæval in form, but full of a frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly any northerner of that day possessed. Often enough this degenerated into frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long sleep of the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them all.
It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian monks, to these highly-coloured verses. ”

“ I open 247eye and ear, and through these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides: flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or of the majesty of innumerable worlds. ”

“ Nature is the body of God.
'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules in the good qualities of all things.'
'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.'
In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and self-begotten of God. ”

“ I have seen the star that is brighter than all other, that is glorious and fair above all other, through whom may I ever spend my life in love.
On such a theme the poet rings endless changes. The most charming is the poem Phyllis and Flora. Actual landscape is not given, but details are treated with freshness and care:
In the flowery season of the year, under a sky serene, while the earth's lap was painted with many colours, when the messenger of Aurora had put to flight the stars, sleep left the eyes of Phyllis and of Flora, two maidens whose beauty answered to the morning light. ”

“ As only the quiet stream shews the sky and the objects around, so it is only on quiet souls that Nature's pictures are painted; ruffled water reflects nothing.' He waxes eloquent about birds' songs, flowers, and brooks, and wanders by the hour in the woods, 'all his senses open to Nature's impressions,' which are 'rays from that source of all beauty, the sight of which will one day bless the soul.' His friend is soon convinced that Nature cannot be overpraised, and that her art is endlessly great. ”

“ It is true that Nature plays no direct rôle in Robinson Crusoe, and wins as little notice there as in its numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present. ”

“ A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground.
In Stella:
Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.
I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.
In Faust:
The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.
When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world perishing with him:
The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future. ”

“ I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in silence, whilst the soft stream 308winds gently through the willows which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart.... ”

“ There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore in Titan, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. ”

“ But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin. ”

“ They recognized their own individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as counterparts to feeling and for her own sake.
Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. ”

“ Beyond was a view of fields. Leon would sit for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a poplar--the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give shelter to all the birds under heaven--while the rustle of the leaves sang his melancholy to sleep. His biographer goes on to say that he had the Spaniard's special delight in Nature, and understood her language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, colours, and forms could move him to tears. ”

“ He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and subjective, than any we have met hitherto.
Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands. ”

“ The cooling zephyr and the morning sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better ”

“ There can scarcely be another epic in the world so poor in descriptions of time and place as the Nibelungenlied; it cannot be used to prove German feeling for Nature!
India, Persia, and Greece made natural phenomena the counterparts of human life, weaving into the tale, by way of comparison or environment, charming genre pictures of plant and animal life, each complete in itself; in the Nibelungenlied Nature plays no part at all, not even as framework. ”

“ Mirtilla stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly on the old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy bedewed his cheeks.... How beautiful! how beautiful is the landscape! How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven through the broken clouds! They fly, they pass away, these towering clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny landscape.... Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture! ”