ympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be
said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so
she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of
modern times was reflected.

He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and
his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in
later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic
poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the
imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from
boyhood up, as he said in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, he had 'a warm
feeling for all objective things.'

No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and
many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves
very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close
and original observation of Nature.

He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:

His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder
height.'

'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon,
delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast
to possess thee.'

'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'

'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in
winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'

The stars move 'with flower feet.'

The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of
earth.'

A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground.

In _Stella_:

Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to
return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.

I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.

In _Faust_:

The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human
effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.

When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and
non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world
perishing with him:

The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the
future.

These are among his still more numerous metaphors:

A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the
stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past.
Iphigenia says to Orestes:

O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame
and cool it.

and Eleonora complains about Tasso:

Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Fo