sant
meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined
upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of
poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for
description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast
made up of sauces.

Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art
of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies
in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape
painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical
acumen was not at home.

But his discussions established the position that external objects of
any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper
subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took
them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human
feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's
lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer
and inner world.

Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon
prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through
Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so
long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer,
Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds
spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was
marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of
feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while
holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its
taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural,
by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the
people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention
which had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his
plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks
upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in
succeeding days.

The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the
plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[2] he
said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and
events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can
actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The
different parts of the song are no more connected together than the
trees and bushes in a wood