'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!'

But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all
the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.

There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as
Montreux, _Schãferei von der schönen Juliana_, since 1595; Urfé's
_Astrée_ and Montemayor's _Diana_ appeared in 1619, and Sidney's
_Arcadia_ ten years later.

Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and
hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as _Daphne,
Galatea, Corydon,_ and _Asteria_, his _Schãferei von der 'Nymphen
Hercinie.'_

His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything
else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the
mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn
began to shew herself and everything with her....

'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down
from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort
me.'

He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and
rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three
shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia
appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the
shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind
Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea,