Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and poetry.  At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry....  This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos themselves.  In poetry a fondness for description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing....  Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be chosen.  Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination.  The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

And against descriptive poetry he said: 

When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow.  Pope expressly enjoined upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for description.  A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast made up of sauces.

Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical acumen was not at home.

But his discussions established the position that external objects of any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human feeling.  And the same holds good of landscape painting.  Goethe’s lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer and inner world.

Lessing’s criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through Herder’s warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds spontaneous expression in poetry.  The effect of his pioneering was marked, especially upon Goethe.  Herder understood the revulsion of feeling from the