The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and Göttingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and _La Nouvelle Héloise_, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and freed it from convention! It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he felt became a poem, what he saw a picture. To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, without lyric thought and feeling. But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder. Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of poetry and painting in _Laocoon_, he attacked the error of his day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of seasons, places, plants, etc. He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said: