The _Buch der Lieder_ closes with the North Sea poems (_Die Nordsee_, 1825-1826), inspired by two visits to Norderney, and written in forcible, irregular rhythm. In them we observe first and foremost a particular understanding of nature which is a new gain for German poetry. As far as nature was concerned, Goethe seemed to have exhausted everything. His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies perpetual change of form--this gift of resolving all nature into feeling was his earliest characteristic. It was soon superseded, or rather supplemented, by his capacity for observing and reproducing natural scenes without any ascription of his own feelings to them. He studies nature, becomes an observer and investigator, and finally, thanks to the steadily increasing profundity of his observation, in combination with his genial intuition, an epoch-making discoverer in two great domains of natural science. We see him pass through all the phases of a great mind in its relation to nature--the emotional, the religious-pantheistic, the poetic-scientific--and see him in the end lay such exclusive stress upon material impressions that he thrusts all that is psychical from him as merely disturbing. His views become more and more positive and realistic. In his essay on granite he writes: "I do not fear the reproach of its being a spirit of contradiction that has led me from the observation and delineation of the human heart, that youngest, most multiform, most mobile, most changeable part of creation, that which it is easiest to unsettle and to shake, to the observation of nature's oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son"[18] --namely, granite. [18] Goethe: _Werke_, xxxiii. 164. In what domain was it still possible for a German poet to display fresh, original understanding of nature? From the human heart to granite Goethe had embraced them all. There was one left. Goethe had never sung the sea. He saw it for the first time when he was nearly forty, in Venice, from the Lido. "I heard a loud noise," he writes; "it was the sea, and I soon saw it, rolling high waves up the beach, as it drew back. It was midday and ebb-tide. At last, then, I have seen the sea also with my own eyes." A little further on we come upon the short sentence: "Yes, the sea is a wonderful sight." In the Fifth Act of the Second Part of _Faust_, where the sea and navigation are touched on, it is less the sea itself that is in question than the rescuing of land from it and the making of canals. This was all that Goethe had written about the sea.