'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and people were unnatural and affected--mere inventions to suit the gallant _fêtes_. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's rosy-blue landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. His world had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of the idyllic--witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's brightest pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path--the path it was to follow with such increased fervour. German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not spontaneous. Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together. Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his poetry. His words to a mountain: 'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the inference that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense. He took warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles, mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and his _Spring Song_, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace's _Beatus ille_ was his model for _Zlatna_), has this conventional contrast between his heart and Nature. 'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously, grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.' There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this: 'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell to you! 'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!' But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period. There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as Montreux, _Schãferei von der schönen Juliana_, since 1595; Urfé's _Astrée_ and Montemayor's _Diana_ appeared in 1619, and Sidney's _Arcadia_ ten years later. Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as _Daphne, Galatea, Corydon,_ and _Asteria_, his _Schãferei von der 'Nymphen Hercinie.'_