Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, and feeling for Nature was entirely absent. CHAPTER IX SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[1] The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with me--'tis your duty.' Then the Spring greetings: Now we go into the wide, wide world, With joy and delight we go; The woods are dressing, the meadows greening, The flowers beginning to blow. Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes, For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere. And: What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring From one place to another in sheer delight and glee; While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult around Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all? This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is starting for the hunt in the early morning): When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere, There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and cool. Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold, And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of praise, Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just awake Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost twigs, And it bends them down like children, like good children when they pray; And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green hair. O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know! One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold! The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of Goethe's early work. But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a few side streams which turned away from the main current of the great poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdörfer's and Zesen's poetry about Nature.