(1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical and pietist
clergy; and Spalding's _Human Vocation_[9] (written with a warmth
that reminds one of Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed.
He says:

Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great
sensitiveness, nourish my mind... I open eye and ear, and through
these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides:
flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the
forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round
me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic
glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with
the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with
the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in
blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or
of the majesty of innumerable worlds. Even the commonest and most
familiar things in Nature give me endless delight, when I feel
them with a heart attuned to joy and admiration.... I lose
myself, absorbed in delight, in the consideration of all this
general beauty, of which I hold myself to be a not disfigured
part.

Klopstock, the torch-bearer of Germany's greatest poets, owed much of
his power of the wing to religion. He introduced that new epoch in
the literature of his country which culminated in Goethe. As so often
happens in mental development, the reaction against prevailing
conditions and the advance to higher ones, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, led first of all to the opposite extreme--balance
was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary
reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which