out by machinery and glued together.
Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had
travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his
poetry. His words to a mountain:

'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble
to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the inference
that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense. He took
warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about
the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles,
mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and
his _Spring Song_, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace's
_Beatus ille_ was his model for _Zlatna_), has this conventional
contrast between his heart and Nature.

'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the
gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously,
grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers
growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.'

There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this:

'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell
to you!

'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!'

But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all
the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.

There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as
Montreux, _Schaferei von der schoenen Juliana_, since 1595; Urfe's
_Astree_ and Montemayor's _Diana_ appeared in 1619, and Sidney's
_Arcadia_ ten years later.

Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and
hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as _Daphne,
Galatea, Corydon,_ and _Asteria_, his _Schaferei von der 'Nymphen
Hercinie.'_

His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything
else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the
mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn
began to shew herself and everything with her....

'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down
from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort
me.'

He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and
rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three
shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia
appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the
shep