And with the wild things stay.
When life's the prey of misery,
And all my powers depart,
A leafy grave will be
Far kinder than thy heart.

True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found
comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as
he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and
poetry melted away.'

Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets,
H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject;
but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While
France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany
enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied
the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest),
a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England.
The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the
famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year,
Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of
Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms.

We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and
invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way.

G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in _From the Floure
and Leafe_: