'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall
see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till
my death.'

Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and
other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9]
where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10]

Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all
nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring
up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death.

We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although
honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly
in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every
one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther:

'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in
the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The
night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the
morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The
moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with
false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their
pasture lands and pastor....'

Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in
_Glückhaft Schiff_, shews little feeling for Nature; but in
_Simplicissimus_, on the other hand, that monument of literature