, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes
depicted.' In another place[3] he put the history of feeling for
Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is
made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in
their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and
raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the
power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle
Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the
plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the
same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about
beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on
plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary
affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes,
Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their
finest minutiae, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a
dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes
are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a
storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's _Alps_, Kleist's
poems and Gessner's, Thomson's _Seasons_, speak for themselves.'

He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and
beautiful in the _Moralists_, and translated it[4]; in fact, in
Herder we have already an aesthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.

After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc.,
Nature's influence on man, moral and aesthetic, became, as we have
already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and
rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces of any aesthetic
analysis.

The most important one was Kant's, in his _Observations on the
Beautiful and Sublime_ in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer
feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the
beautiful.

Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a
mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account
of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while
flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by
browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant
feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first
sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to
appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful.