Spring Songs:
See the blossoming of Spring!
Will't not taste the joys it showers?
Dost not feel its impulse thrill?
Friends! away our cares we'll fling!
In the joyous time of flowers,
Love and Bacchus have their will.
and
O forest, O green shady paths,
Dear place of spring's display!
My good luck from the thronging town
Has brought me here away.
O what a fresh breeze flows
Down from the wooded hill,
How pleasantly the west wind flies
With rustling dewy wing
Across the vale,
Where all is green and blossoming.
The personification is more marked in this:
Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming robe
With roses round his head. Smiling he comes, O God!
The hours conduct him to his flowery throne
Into the groves he enters and they bloom; fresh green is on the plain,
The forest shade returns, the west wind lovingly unfurls
Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin to sing.
The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with beauty that enchants,
O Thou rich source of all the beautiful ...
My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love.
His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing
was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas,
that Kleist could write to Gleim[5]: 'The odes please me more the
more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault,
too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram
too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.'
Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round
Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French
style[6] far less than the others--than Hagedorn, for example; and
though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and
aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted
friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[7] but
with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched
Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness.
In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he
wrote:
Lie down in early spring on yon green moss,
By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke,
My brother....
Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above,
So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks
In distant wood, near plain and careless glade,
Here on my little hill and in the clover....
Dost hear the
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