’O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter’s heart not his heart?  Is not he her deepest feeling?  But have I found it?  Do I know it?’

He tries to discern the ‘soul of Nature,’ hears ’the melody of morning light begin with soft notes.’  He says to the flower, ’You are my sister,’ and to the springs, ‘We are of one race’:  he finds symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons:  he feels the beauty of the ‘land like paradise,’ while scarcely ever, except in the poem Heidelberg, giving a clear sketch of scenery.  A number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his writings [18]: 

  The caresses of the charming breezes.

  She light, clear, flattering sea.

  Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and
  lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal.

  Earth, ‘one of the flowers of the sky.’

  Heaven, ‘the unending garden of life.’

  Beauty, that ‘which is one and all.’

He describes his love in a mystical form: 

We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed calyx....  The clear starry night had now become my element, for the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the depths of earth gold grows mysteriously.

He delights ’thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with the lady of his love.’

’Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a little smelly lamp is burning.’  All this is soft and feminine, but it has real poetic charm.

Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his Song of Fate: 

    Nowhere may man abide,
  But painfully from hour to hour
  He stumbles blindly on to the unknown,
  As water falls from rock to rock
    The long year through.

His pantheism finds expression in the odes—­in To Nature, for instance: 

  Since my heart turneth upward to the sun
    As one that hears her voice,
  Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring
    As melody divine;
  Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul,
    The soul of joy, doth move
  On the still waters of my heart—­therefore,
    O Nature! these are golden days to me!

Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature.  Spring[19]: 

  Look all around thee how the spring advances! 
  New life is playing through the gay green trees! 
  See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances
  To the bird’s tread and to the quivering breeze! 
  How every blossom in the sunlight glances! 
  The winter frost to his dark cavern flees,
  And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein
  The kindling influence of the vernal rain. 
  Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain