We must now dwell a little on the conception of nature which corresponds to this conception of art. In _Sternbald_, as both Goethe and Caroline indicate, the reader's interest is distracted from the characters and the action by descriptions of scenery. We have seen that it was Rousseau who rediscovered the feeling for nature. As Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, playing upon Rousseau's own words about the swallow which had built its nest under the eaves of his first home: "He was the swallow that foretold the coming of summer in literature." The same feeling for nature, as has also been shown, reappears in _Werther_. The transformation which it now underwent was this: Rousseau's point of view had been _emotional_, that of the Romanticists was _fantastic_. Hence their return to legends and fairy tales, to the elves and kobolds of popular superstition. Goethe had said: "Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale, Alles ist sie mit einem Male."[5] The Romanticists were determined to have to do only with the kernel, with the mysterious inmost substance, which they attempted to extricate, after having themselves inserted it. The mystic mind mirrored itself in nature and saw in it nothing but mysteries. Tieck, as every one knows, coined the word _Waldeinsamkeit_ (his friends maintained that it ought to be _Waldeseinsamkeit_). Romanticism shouted with quavering voice into the Waldeinsamkeit (forest solitude), and echo returned quavering answers. Alexander von Humboldt has pointed out how the ancients really only saw beauty in nature when she was smiling, friendly, and _useful_ to man. With the Romanticists it is the reverse. To them nature is unbeautiful in proportion as she is useful, and most beautiful in her wildness, or when she awakens a feeling of vague fear. They rejoice in the darkness of night and of deep ravines, in the utter loneliness which produces a shudder of terror; and Tieck's full moon shines as unchangeably over the landscape as though it were a theatrical one of oiled paper with a lamp behind it. I call it Tieck's moon, because it is incontestably Tieck who is the originator of the Romantic moonlit landscape. Nor is it difficult to understand how it should be he, rather than any other of the young writers, who originates such expressions as "forest solitude," "magic moonlit nights," &c., &c. Tieck was born in Berlin, perhaps of all large towns the one whose surroundings possess the fewest natural attractions. Those sandy heaths of Brandenburg, with their tall, spare firs standing stiffly in rows like Prussian soldiers, form as meagre a landscape as one could well find. Whilst Rousseau, living amidst scenery of paradisaic beauty (the neighbourhood of Geneva and Mont Blanc), was strongly, directly impressed by nature, Tieck, in his unlovely surroundings, was seized by the city-dweller's morbid longing for wood and mountain; and this longing gave birth to a fantastic conception of nature. The cold daylight glare of Berlin, and