Towards the end of last century Europe had reached this third stage. In all the foremost nations it showed itself by this as one among many new symptoms, that there was an awakening to the presence of Nature, and to the power of it, with an intimacy and vividness unknown before. Men became aware of the presence of the visible world, and, almost startled by it, they asked what it meant. What was so old and familiar came home to them as if it were now for the first time discovered. Here and there were men who, having had their fevered pulses stimulated almost to madness by the throes that preceded or accompanied the Revolution, turned instinctively to find repose in the eternal freshness that is in the outer world. This tendency showed itself in different ways in different countries, and expressed itself variously, according to the nature of the men who were the organs of it. In France this new passion for Nature found a representative in Rousseau, as early as 1759, in whose writings, in spite of their mawkish sentiment, their morbid “self-torturing,” their false politics and distorted morality, all men of taste have felt the fascination of their eloquence and the picturesqueness with which the shores of the Leman Lake are described. Later in the century, Goethe, in Germany, expressed the same feeling with all the difference there is between the Teutonic and the Gallic genius. More than any poet before him, or any since, he combined the scientific with the poetic view of Nature, or rather he studied the facts and laws of Nature with the eye of a physicist, and saw the beauty that is in these with the eye of a poet. It has been said of him that he worshiped God in Nature. It would be more true to say, that perceiving intelligently the unity that pervades all things, he felt intensely the beauty of that unity, he delighted in the wide views of the Universe which science had recently unfolded. But as the moral side of things, as duty and self-surrender hardly entered into his thoughts, it is misleading to speak of merely scientific contemplation and æsthetic delight as worship or devotion. Worship implies a personal relation to a personal being, and this was hardly in Goethe’s thoughts at all. But whatever may be the true account of his ultimate views, he is the German representative of the great wave of feeling of which I speak.