ith fresh
green, and close to me were the enormous ruins of the old castle,
half in light and half in shade. You can easily fancy how it
fascinated me. I stood lost in the view quite half an hour, till
the rising moon woke me from my dreams.

Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his Italian
journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic and epic
poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In sending
_Der Juengling und der Muehlbach_ to Schiller from Switzerland in 1797,
he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material for idylls and
elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is called.'

Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey
to Sicily, 1787; among them were _Calm at Sea_:

Silence deep rules o'er the waters,
Calmly slumbering lies the main.

and _Prosperous Voyage_:

The mist is fast clearing,
And radiant is heaven,
Whilst AEolus loosens
Our anguish-fraught bond.

The most perfect of all such short poems was the _Evening Song_,
written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau.
He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is
perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is
great and simple--the sun down.'

Every tree top is at peace.
E'en the rustling woods do cease
Every sound;
The small birds sleep on every bough.
Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou
Sleep in peace.

The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the
wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's
perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which
feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in
so many words in the _Night Song_; but it is all there, like the
united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURE.)

The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject
and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works
them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the
Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of
Nature.

He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most
universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge
worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his
younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion,
and, with the more obje