Part 50 (1/2)

He describes his love in a mystical form:

We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed calyx.... The clear starry night 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 distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.

Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings were as shadows.

'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:

I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, twigs, leaves, gra.s.ses to catch the melody and all repeat my music with a thousand tongues.[20]

To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a pa.s.sion; they longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music.

'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and starlight, were in all their songs.

There is a background of landscape all through _Franz Sternbald's Wanderings_.

In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to fill up the page.

Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her _Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen_, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in _Werther_ tunes scenery and soul to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery.

Jean Paul, like Tieck in _Franz Sternbald_, never spares us one sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day: