In Schiller’s sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.

He was the humorous and satirical idyllist par excellence, and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose.  There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas.  With the exception of Lake Maggiore in Titan, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling.  They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her.  There is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; therein lies his pantheistic trait.  ‘To each man,’ he said,[17] ’Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the most beautiful?  Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.’  Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals.  Was she more beautiful?  He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be.  For example, from Siebenkas: 

    I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on
    the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne
    away to the ocean of eternity.

    To the butterfly—­proboscis of Siebenkaes, enough honey—­cells
    were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.

When they had passed the gate—­that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it—­the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart.  Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle.  The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.

When it was autumn in his heart: 

Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past.  Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths....  But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers.

When his married life grew more unhappy, in December: