t had now become my element, for
the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the
depths of earth gold grows mysteriously.

He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with
the lady of his love.'

'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves;
and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a
little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it
has real poetic charm.

Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his _Song of Fate_:

Nowhere may man abide,
But painfully from hour to hour
He stumbles blindly on to the unknown,
As water falls from rock to rock
The long year through.

His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in _To Nature_, for
instance:

Since my heart turneth upward to the sun
As one that hears her voice,
Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring
As melody divine;
Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul,
The soul of joy, doth move
On the still waters of my heart--therefore,
O Nature! these are golden days to me!

Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[19]:

Look all around thee how the spring advances!
New life is playing through the gay green trees!
See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances
To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze!
How every blossom in the sunlight glances!
The winter frost to his dark cavern flees,
And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein
The kindling influence of the vernal rain.
Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing,
Dance joyously the verdant vales along;
Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing,
Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song.
And all their bright and lovely hues revealing,
A thousand plants the field and forest throng;
Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers,
And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.

All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel
_William Lovell_, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose
only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.

He wrote from Florence:

Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full
of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at
last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is
satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's
country-house, and gazed at the dist