Elsewhere he says that his lady’s favour turns his winter to spring, and adds: 

  Cold winter ’twas no more for me,
  Though others felt it bitterly;
  To me it was mid May.

He has many pictures of Nature and pretty comparisons, but the stereotyped style predominates—­heath, flowers, grass, and nightingales.  The pearl of the collection is the naive song which touches sensuous feeling, like the Song of Solomon, with the magic light of innocence: 

  Under the lime on the heath where I sat with my love,
  There you would find
  The grass and the flowers all crushed—­
  Sweetly the nightingale sang in the vale by the wood. 
  Tandaradei! 
  When I came up to the meadow my lover was waiting me there. 
  Ah! what a greeting I had!  Gracious Mary, ’tis bliss to me still! 
  Tandaradei!  Did he kiss me, you ask?  Look at the red of my lips! 
  Of sweet flowers of all sorts he made us a bed,
  I wager who passes now smiles at the sight,
  The roses would still show just where my head lay. 
  Tandaradei! 
  But how he caressed me, that any but one
  Should know that, God forbid!  I were shamed if they did;
  Only he and I know it,
  And one little birdie who never will tell.

So we see that interest in Nature in the literature of the Crusaders very seldom went beyond the utilitarian bounds of pleasure and admiration in fertility and pleasantness; and the German national epics rarely alluded to her traits even by way of comparison.  The court epics shewed some advance, and sympathy was distinctly traceable in Gottfried, and even attained to artistic expression in his lyrics, where his own feelings chimed with Nature.

For the rest, the Minnesingers’ descriptions were all alike.  The charm of Nature apart from other considerations, delight in her for her own sake alone, was unknown to the time.

Hitherto we have only spoken of literature.

Feeling for Nature reveals itself in plastic art also, especially in painting; and since the mind of a people is one united organism, the relation between poetry and painting is not one of opposition and mutual exclusion—­they rather enlarge and explain, or condition each other.

As concerns feeling for Nature, it may be taken as a universal rule that landscape-painting only develops when Nature is sought for her own sake, and that so long as scenery merely serves the purpose of ornament in literature, so long it merely serves as accessory and background in painting; whereas, when Nature takes a wider space in prose and poetry, and becomes an end of representation in herself, the moment for the birth of landscape-painting has come.  We will follow the stages of the development of painting very briefly, from Woltmann and Woermann’s excellent book,[9] which, if it throws no fresh light upon our subject, illustrates what has just been said in a striking manner.