nexhaustible source of rapture!
From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild
influence nourishes, all is wonderful! What rapture overpowers me
when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread
landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and
examine the various flowers and herbs and their little
inhabitants; when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry
heavens!... Wrapt in each other's arms, let us contemplate the
approach of morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams
of moonlight; and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us
breathe out in broken accents our praises and thanksgivings. Ah!
what inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the
transports of the tenderest love.

Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally
feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards
Nature.

The aesthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote _On the Beauty of Nature_.
Crugot's widely-read work of edification, _Christ in Solitude_
(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 i