Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey to Sicily, 1787; among them were _Calm at Sea_: Silence deep rules o'er the waters, Calmly slumbering lies the main. and _Prosperous Voyage_: The mist is fast clearing, And radiant is heaven, Whilst Æolus loosens Our anguish-fraught bond. The most perfect of all such short poems was the _Evening Song_, written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is great and simple--the sun down.' Every tree top is at peace. E'en the rustling woods do cease Every sound; The small birds sleep on every bough. Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou Sleep in peace. The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in so many words in the _Night Song_; but it is all there, like the united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.) The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of Nature. He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza. But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, 'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let him down upon inaccessible rocks.'