In the flowery season I sat beneath a shady tree while the birds sang in the groves ... and listened to my Thisbe’s talk, the talk I love and long for; and we spoke of the sweet interchange of love, and in the doubtful balance of the mind wanton love and chastity were wavering.

I have seen the bright green of flowers, I have seen the flower of flowers, I have seen the rose of May; I have seen the star that is brighter than all other, that is glorious and fair above all other, through whom may I ever spend my life in love.

On such a theme the poet rings endless changes.  The most charming is the poem Phyllis and Flora.  Actual landscape is not given, but details are treated with freshness and care: 

In the flowery season of the year, under a sky serene, while the earth’s lap was painted with many colours, when the messenger of Aurora had put to flight the stars, sleep left the eyes of Phyllis and of Flora, two maidens whose beauty answered to the morning light.  The breeze of spring was gently whispering, the place was green and gay with grass, and in the grass itself there flowed a living brook that played and babbled as it went.  And that the sun’s heat might not harm the maidens, near the stream there was a spreading pine, decked with leaves and spreading far its interweaving branches, nor could the heat penetrate from without.  The maidens sat, the grass supplied the seat....  They intend to go to Love’s Paradise:  at the entrance of the grove a rivulet murmurs; the breeze is fragrant with myrrh and balsam; they hear the music of a hundred timbrels and lutes.  All the notes of the birds resound in all their fulness; they hear the sweet and pleasant song of the blackbird, the garrulous lark, the turtle and the nightingale, etc....  He who stayed there would become immortal; every tree there rejoices in its own fruit; the ways are scented with myrrh and cinnamon and amomum; the master could be forced out of his house.

The first to shew proof of a deepening effect of Nature on the human spirit was Dante.

Dante and Petrarch elaborated the Hellenistic feeling for Nature; hence the further course of the Renaissance displayed all its elements, but with increased subjectivity and individuality.

No one, since the days of Hellenism, had climbed mountains for the sake of the view—­Dante was the first to do it.  And although, in ranging heaven, earth, hell, and paradise in the Divina Commedia, he rarely described real Nature, and then mostly in comparisons; yet, as Humboldt pointed out, how incomparably in a few vigorous lines he wakens the sense of the morning airs and the light on the distant sea in the first canto of Purgatorio: 

The dawn was vanquishing the matin hour,
Which fled before it,-so that from afar
I recognized the trembling of the sea.

And how vivid this is: