He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and
night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees
cut into shapes, as beautiful.

Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to
lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by
the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling
starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to
activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful
stimulates.

He goes on to subdivide the sublime:

This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection,
sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense
of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the
second the noble, the third the splendid sublime.

Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why
great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always
been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and
ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the
beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental.

He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely:

The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is
adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called
romantic.

In his _Kalligone_, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in
making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night
sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime
and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a
tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the
romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of
Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without
character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says,
'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle
valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the
sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and
movement.'

And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and
horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming
valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are
recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw
the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the
lowest, from palm tr