overcharged soul....
O starry goddess with the crown of gold,
Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam
A thousand worlds ...
Silence divine, that filleth all the world,
Flowing so softly to the eternal shores
Of an eternal universe....

And in _St John's Night_, he exclaims:

Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!

Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his
day. His correspondence with his _fiancee_ shews this[8]; one sees
Rousseau's influence:

My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming
wood close to Bueckeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my
garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three
nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these
hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the
nightingale.

I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I
live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only
poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.

And his _fiancee_ wrote:

'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my
best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems
beautiful to me.

and

I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by
clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the
frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my
whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one,
and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.

and

Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield
without stroking them.

Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found
lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his
own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the
liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry
reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual,
and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.

His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements
of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at
will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm,
even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.

While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving
extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons
which prove s