divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of
rationalism and pietism.

Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs
of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while a
like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed
the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to wood,
tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical,
half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin.

There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower Rhine,[7]
which suggests the poems of the eighth and ninth centuries, about a
great quarrel between Spring, crowned with flowers, and hoary-headed
Winter, in which one praises and the other blames the cuckoo for
announcing Spring.

In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a
mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter,
then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of
frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and
hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are
called his vassals, etc.

There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer:

When that the breezes blow in May,
And snow melts from the wood away,
Blue violets lift their heads on high,
And when the little wood-birds sing,
And flow'rets from the ground up-spring,