Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9] where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10] Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death. We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther: 'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their pasture lands and pastor....' Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in _Glückhaft Schiff_, shews little feeling for Nature; but in _Simplicissimus_, on the other hand, that monument of literature which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the Thirty Years' War. When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at midnight, he heard the old man sing: Come, nightingale, comfort of the night, Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator, While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!... The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God.... My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods. _Simplicissimus_ goes on: 'During this song, methinks, it was as if nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.' What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during the latter half of the seventeenth century? In Italy and Spain it had assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically mystical; Shakespeare's plays had brought sympathy to maturity in England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine. But the idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and artificiality, the hatching of empty effect.