ves us cold.

We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of
sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said:
'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the
grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened,
and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole
natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves
one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.'

In _Worship at the Cross_ there is pious feeling for Nature and
mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism,
superstition, and other objectionable traits[20]; and mystical
confessions of the same sort may be gathered in numbers from the
works of contemporary monks and nuns. Even of such a fanatic and
self-tormentor as the Spanish Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562),
his biographer says that despite his strict renunciation of the
world, he retained a most warm and deep feeling for Nature.

'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and gave
it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery window,
often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he was as if
beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw the power
and glory of God reflected in charming flowers and plants.'

When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of
Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I
find God in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are
attributed to many others.

Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St Teresa
von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly pretty
pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the soul
life of the Christian.[21]

In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was no
interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or less
dictated by religious feeling. It was in the later German and Italian
mystics--for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob Boehme--that a
more subjective and individual point of view was attained through
Pantheism and Protestantism.

The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense
feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon.

CHAPTER VI

SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE

The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature
can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications,
and eloquent expres