ep melodious sigh
of all Nature.'

'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down
into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy
the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he
feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful
feeling, for which language has no other name than love and
bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks,
palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor
self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[25]

Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of
the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption.

Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite
lacking: witness Hulsen's[26] _Observations on Nature on a Journey
through Switzerland_; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by
mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in
Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his _Tautgenichts_.

The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did
enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for
Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand
threads.

Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many
deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is
still carrying us farther forward.

Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although
feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of
electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with
knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of religion, and
the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us,
either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force
working through matter--the indestructible active principle of life
in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine enthusiasm for
Nature with their tireless search for truth--for example, Humboldt,
Haeckel, and Paul Guessfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this
light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet
who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and
remain insensible to the impression?

Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the
straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft,
like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is
s