Gregory of Nyssa was still more sentimental and plaintive than Basil and Gregory Nazianzen: 

When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the lilies at my feet decked by Nature with the double charms of perfume and of colour, when in the distance I see the ocean, towards which the clouds are onward borne, my spirit is overpowered by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment.  When in autumn the fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the everlasting and regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of the wondrous powers pervading all things.  He who contemplates them with the eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid the greatness of the universe.

Are not these thoughts, which Humboldt rightly strings together, highly significant and modern?  Especially in view of the opinion which Du Bois Reymond, for example, expresses:  ’In antiquity, mediaeval times, and in later literature up to the last century, one seeks in vain for the expression of what we call a feeling for Nature.’[11]

Might not Werther have written them?  They have all his sentimental melancholy, coupled with that ‘delight of sorrow’ which owes its name (Wonne der Wehmuth) to Goethe, although its meaning was known to Euripides.

Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature’s individual traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and humbles at once.

Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the classic.

But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she was treated with most unscientific contempt.  For the development of feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to backward movements.  The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and pessimistic elements.

The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in self-forgetting devotion and surrender.

Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the world little behind the modern in sentimentality.

What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just given, applies with equal force to the others: