After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon everything about living things will be clear to me.'[13] Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling. As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her independent importance; he only assigned her a _rôle_ in relation to the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand, we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's _Night Thoughts_: Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne In rayless majesty now stretches forth Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc. There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling heroes. For instance: His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill. Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams. As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of battle.