mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to
_Ueber das Firmament_:

As lately in the sapphire depths,
Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end,
In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed,
And my absorbed glance, now here, now there,
But ever deeper sank--horror came over me,
My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast.
That infinite vast vault,
True picture of Eternity,
Since without birth or end
From God alone it comes....
It overwhelmed my soul.
The mighty dome of deep dark light,
Bright darkness without birth or bound,
Swallowed the very world--burying thought.
My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought;
I lost myself,
So suddenly it beat me down,
And threatened with despair.
But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss,
All present God! in Thee--I found myself again.

While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these
signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and
philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance,
Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle
of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth
century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not