German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not spontaneous.  Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together.  Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his poetry.  His words to a mountain: 

’Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble to climb thee is repaid by delight,’ scarcely admit the inference that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense.  He took warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles, mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and his Spring Song, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace’s Beatus ille was his model for Zlatna), has this conventional contrast between his heart and Nature.

’The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the gentle breeze is on the, fields again.  Seed is growing vigorously, grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.’

There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this: 

’Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell to you!

‘My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!’

But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.

There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as Montreux, Schaferei von der schoenen Juliana, since 1595; Urfe’s Astree and Montemayor’s Diana appeared in 1619, and Sidney’s Arcadia ten years later.

Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as Daphne, Galatea, Corydon, and Asteria, his Schaferei von der ’Nymphen Hercinie.’

His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything else in the poem.  He tells how he did not wake ’until night, the mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn began to shew herself and everything with her....

’I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort me.’

He came to a spring ’which fell from a crag with charming murmur and rustle,’ cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream.  One of the shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water:  ’Kind Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, river, and spring.’