ravagances contrast the excellent descriptions
of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance,
the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_,
evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The
Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery
is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'

Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow
Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife
Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo!
The path allures me through the pastoral green
And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee
Hums round me, and on hesitating wing
O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly
Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life
Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen--
E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring.
Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing.
The thicket rustles near, the alders bow
Down their green coronals, and as I pass,
Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass;
Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now
Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made
Cool-breathing, etc.

Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than
direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical.
He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who
seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier
chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and
that not all moderns are sentimental.

As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and
Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not
come,' lying, as he says in _The Bride of Messina_, like a child on
the bosom of Nature.

In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more
sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.

He was the humorous and satirical idyllist _par excellence_, and laid
the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the
trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an
almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious
metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore
in _Titan_, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his
references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with
the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They
all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own
countryside, fin