ghted by a star,
And with the slow sweep of her heavy wing
Awes and revives the timid earth.

Buerger sings in praise of idyllic comfort in _The Village_, and
Hoelty's mild enthusiasm, touched with melancholy, turned in the same
direction.

My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm;
all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a
wife in my hut.

The beginning of his _Country Life_ shews that moralizing was still
in the air:

Happy the man who has the town escaped!
To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks,
The shining pebbles preach
Virtue's and wisdom's lore....
The nightingale on him sings slumber down;
The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet,
When shines the lovely red
Of morning through the trees.
Then he admires Thee in the plain, O God!
In the ascending pomp of dawning day,
Thee in Thy glorious sun.
The worm--the budding branch--
Where coolness gushes in the waving branch
Or o'er the flowers streams the fountain, rests,
Inhales the breadth of prime
The gentle airs of eve.
His straw-decked thatch, where doves bask in the sun,
And play, and hop, invites to sweeter rest
Than golden halls of state
Or beds of down afford.
To him the plumy people
Chatter and whistle on his
And from his quiet hand
Peck crumbs or peas or grains

His _Winter Song_ runs:

Summer joys are o'er,
Flow'rets bloom no more;
Wintry joys are sweeping,
Through the snow-drifts peeping;
Cheerful evergreen
Rarely now is seen.

No more plumed throng
Charms the woods with song;
Ice-bound trees are glittering,
Merry snow-birds twittering,
Fondly strive to cheer
Scenes so cold and drear.

Winter, still I see
Many charms in thee,
Love thy chilly greeting,
Snow-storms fiercely beating,
And the dear delights
Of the long, long nights.

Hoeltz was the most sentimental of this group; Joh. Heinrich Voss was
more robust and cheerful. He put his strength into his longer poems;
the lyrics contain a great deal of nonsense. An extract from _Luise_
will shew his idyllic taste:

Wandering thus through blue fields of flax and acres of barley,
both paused on the hill-top, which commands such a view of the
whole lake, crisped with the soft breath of the zephyr and
sparkling in sunshine; fair were the forests of white barked
birch beyond, and the fir-trees, lovely the villa