Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite lacking:  witness Hulsen’s[26] Observations on Nature on a Journey through Switzerland; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in Eichendorff’s beautiful songs and his Tautgenichts.

The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand threads.

Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is still carrying us farther forward.

Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with knowledge.  Science has even become the investigator of religion, and the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us, either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force working through matter—­the indestructible active principle of life in the region of the visible.  Our explorers combine enthusiasm for Nature with their tireless search for truth—­for example, Humboldt, Haeckel, and Paul Guessfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and remain insensible to the impression?

Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the straight line of development as in earlier times.  Our garden craft, like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste:  spaces of turf with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign plants.  In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked:  landscapes such as Bocklin’s, entirely projected by the imagination and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries with the most faithful studies from Nature.  It is the same with literature.  In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work of great writers—­for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, and Theodore Storm.

In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible.  Heine, the greatest lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an enchantingly fair body with a fish’s tail, wrote in the Travels in the Harz:  ’How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds’ songs, sweet melancholy, the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together and form the loveliest of arabesques.’