While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of modern times was reflected. He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from boyhood up, as he said in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, he had 'a warm feeling for all objective things.' No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close and original observation of Nature. He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature: His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder height.' 'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast to possess thee.' 'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.' 'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in winter, but ripens quickly in summer.' The stars move 'with flower feet.' The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of earth.' A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground. In _Stella_: Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world. I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning. In _Faust_: The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human effort; its coloured reflection the image of life. When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world perishing with him: The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future. These are among his still more numerous metaphors: A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. Iphigenia says to Orestes: O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame and cool it. and Eleonora complains about Tasso: Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder. In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around.