A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees, You know him well whose many rhymes And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen; Remember the joy of those fine summer nights. To Eleanora: Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude Between your alder rows, and think ... As in the oft-repeated lesson The young birds' cry shall bear my longing; And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for me. In a time of despair, he wrote: Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! Twist and split bark and twig, And break the tree of hope in two Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath. Again: The woods I'll wander through, From men I'll flee away, With lonely doves I'll coo, And with the wild things stay. When life's the prey of misery, And all my powers depart, A leafy grave will be Far kinder than thy heart. True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and poetry melted away.' Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets, H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject; but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest), a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England. The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year, Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms. We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way. G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in _From the Floure and Leafe_: So was I with the song Thorow ravished, that till late and long Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ... And at the last, I gan full well aspie Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree On the further side, even right by me, That gave so passing a delicious smell According to the eglentere full well.... On the sote grass I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent, The birddes song was more convenient, And more pleasant to me by many fold Than meat or drink or any other thing. Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love: The rocks do not so cruelly Repulse the waves continually, As she my suit and affection So that I am past remedy.