The personification is more marked in this:
Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming
robe
With roses round his head. Smiling
he comes, O God!
The hours conduct him to his flowery throne
Into the groves he enters and they bloom;
fresh green is on the plain,
The forest shade returns, the west wind
lovingly unfurls
Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin
to sing.
The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with
beauty that enchants,
O Thou rich source of all the beautiful
...
My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest
love.
His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas, that Kleist could write to Gleim[5]: ’The odes please me more the more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault, too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.’
Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French style[6] far less than the others—than Hagedorn, for example; and though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[7] but with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness.
In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he wrote:
Lie down in early spring on yon green
moss,
By yon still brook where heart with heart
we spoke,
My brother....
Will’t see the little garden and
the pleasant heights above,
So quiet and unspoilt? O friend,
’tis Nature speaks
In distant wood, near plain and careless
glade,
Here on my little hill and in the clover....
Dost hear the rustle of the streamlet
through the wood?
Jacobi was one whose heart, as he said of Gleim, took a warm interest in all that breathed, even a violet, and sought sympathy and companionship in the whole range of creation.
This is from his Morning Song:
See how the wood awakes, how from the
lighted heights
With the soft waving breeze
The morning glory smiles in the fresh
green....
Here by the rippling brook and quivering
flower,
We catch Love’s rustle as she gently
sweeps
Like Spring’s own breath athwart
the plains.
Another song is;
Tell me, where’s the violet fled.
Late so gayly blowing.
Springing ’neath fair Flora’s
tread,
Choicest sweets bestowing?
Swain, the vernal scene is o’er,
And the violet blooms no more.
Say, where hides the blushing rose,
Pride of fragrant morning,
Garland meet for beauty’s brows,
Hill and dale adorning?
Gentle maid, the summer’s fled,
And the hapless rose is dead.


