His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn began to shew herself and everything with her.... 'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort me.' He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, river, and spring.' Fleming too, who already stood much higher as a lyrist and had travelled widely, lacked the power of describing scenery, and must needs call Oreads, Dryads, Castor and Pollux to his aid. He rarely reached the simple purity of his fine sonnet _An Sich,_ or the feeling in this: 'Dense wild wood, where even the Titan's brightest rays give no light, pity my sufferings. In my sick soul 'tis as dark as in thy black hollow.' In this time of decline the hymns of the Evangelical Church (to which Fleming contributed) were full of feeling, and brought the national songs to mind as nothing else did. A few lines of Paul Gerhardt's seem to me to out-weigh whole volumes of contemporary rhymes--lines of such beauty as the _Evening Song_: Now all the woods are sleeping, And night and stillness creeping O'er field and city, man and beast; The last faint beam is going, The golden stars are glowing In yonder dark-blue deep. And after him, and more like him than any one else, came Andreas Gryphius. There was much rhyming about Nature in the poet schools of Hamburg, Königsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an idle tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with high-flown titles, as in Philipp von Zesen's _Pleasure of Spring_, and _Poetic Valley of Roses and Lilies_. 'Up, my thoughts, be glad of heart, in this joyous pleasant March; ah! see spring is reviving, earth opens her treasury,' etc. His romances were more noteworthy if not more interesting. He certainly aimed high, striving for simplicity and clearness of expressions in opposition to the Silesian poets, and hating foreign words. His feeling for Nature was clear; he loved to take his reader into the garden, and was enthusiastic about cool shady walks, beds of tulips, birds' songs, and echoes. Idyllic pastoral life was the fashion--people of distinction gave themselves up to country life and wore shepherd costume--and he introduced a pastoral episode into his romance, _Die adriatische Rosemund._[15] Rosemund, whose father places arbitrary conditions in the way of her marriage with Markhold, becomes a shepherdess.