Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the flowers of love.  ’Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be gathered,’ was a common saying; and ’Gather roses by night, for then all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.’  ’The roses are ready to be gathered, so gather them to-day.  He who does not gather in summer, will not gather in winter.’  There is tenderness in this:  ’I only know a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green meadow, ‘tis called forget-me-not.’

These are sadder: 

  There is a lime tree in this valley,
  O God! what does it there? 
  It will help me to grieve
  That I have no lover.

’Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall see my beloved?  Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till my death.’

Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9] where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10]

Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death.

We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly in the famous comparison of ’the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every one hears everywhere now,’ in praise of Luther: 

’Wake up, the dawn is nigh!  I hear a joyous nightingale singing in the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice.  The night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through.  The moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their pasture lands and pastor....’

Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in Glueckhaft Schiff, shews little feeling for Nature; but in Simplicissimus, on the other hand, that monument of literature which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the Thirty Years’ War.

When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at midnight, he heard the old man sing: 

  Come, nightingale, comfort of the night,
  Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator,
  While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!... 
  The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God.... 
  My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all
  And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise
  Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods.