The material of all things issues from the original womb,
  For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths;
  She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind. 
  Which fashions its own material, not that of others,
  And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself
  Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles. 
  Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere,
  Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one,
  Orders and disposes of everything together.

Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom and love of God, and His image in Nature.  He personified everything in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of all things.

The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of Mystics, Jacob Boehme.  Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a ferment of different systems of thought.  It is very difficult to unriddle his Aurora, but love of Nature, as well as love of God, is clear in its mystical utterances: 

  God is the heart or source of Nature. 
  Nature is the body of God.

’As man’s mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules in the good qualities of all things.’

’But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.’

In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and self-begotten of God.

Nature’s powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in lofty and beautiful comparisons: 

’As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries[5] ... creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading superficial godhead ... and is like the music of many flutes combined into one great harmony.’

But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century and, in a sense, of the German race, was Luther.  That maxim of Goethe’s for teaching and ethics,’ Cheerfulness is the mother of all virtues, might well serve as a motto for Luther;

The two men had much in common.

The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself from mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief.

The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the incarnation of the modern man, had to shake off the artificiality and weak sentimentality of the eighteenth.

To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being.  Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book.  ’Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!’