till the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf
with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden
to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign
plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked:
landscapes such as Bocklin's, entirely projected by the imagination
and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries
with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with
literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental
rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced
descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work
of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern,
and Theodore Storm.

In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the greatest
lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an
enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the _Travels in
the Harz_: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer
world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of
feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet melancholy,
the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together
and form the loveliest of arabesques.'

But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after
effect--for example, in _The Fig Tree_; and although _The Lotos
Flower_ is a gem, and the _North Sea Pictures_ shew the fine eye of a
poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his
personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is
forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect.

Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in poetry
and painting, and technical facility and truth of representation now
stand on one level with the appreciation of her charms.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

[Footnote 1: _Kritische Gaenge_. Comp. Vischer, _Ueber den optischen
Formsinn,_ and Carl du Prel, _Psychologie der Lyrik_.]

[Footnote 2: As in elegy _Ghatarkarparam_.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Humboldt, _Cosmos_. Schnaase, _Geschichte der
bildenden Kuenste_.]

[Footnote 4: See _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefuehls bei den Griechen
und Roemern_, Biese.]

CHAPTER I

[Footnote 1: Lucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque nominibus adpellant
secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident, Tac. Germ. Comp. Grimm,
_Deutsche Mythologie_.]

[Footnote 2: Grimm. Simrock, _Handbuch der Mytho