True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in ‘God’s dear world’ that he took the greatest pleasure.  He could not have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small.  ’By God’s mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore we praise and thank Him.  In His creatures we see the power of His word—­how great it is.  In a peach stone, too, for hard as the shell is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right time.’[6] Again, ’So God is present in all creatures, even the smallest leaves and poppy seeds.’

All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the fatherly goodness of God.  He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor Brneck: 

I have lately seen two wonderful things:  the first, looking from the window at the stars and God’s whole beautiful sky dome, I saw never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is still firm in its place.  Now, there are some who search for such pillars and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and because they cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would certainly fall ... the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep over our heads, so heavy that they might be compared to a great sea, and yet I saw no ground on which they rested, and no vats in which they were contained, yet they did not fall on us, but greeted us with a frown and flew away.  When they had gone, the rainbow lighted both the ground and the roof which had held them.

Luther often used very forcible images from Nature.  ’It is only for the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when our summer comes, our grain will spring up—­rain, sun, and wind prepare us for it—­that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy Ghost.’

His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms:  ’There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and beautiful gardens—­nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy thoughts of God and His goodness are the lovely flowers.’

His description of heaven for his little son John is full of simple reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and mystical speculation as to God’s relation to His universe; and Protestant divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of rationalism and pietism.

Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs of a nation are always the medium.  They were so now; for, while a like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to wood, tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin.