82 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



strongest contrasts of desert barrenness and luxuriant vege- 

 tation, in the same horizontal plane, as well as in the vertical 

 elevation of the snow-capped mountain chains of India and 

 of Afghanistan. Wherever a lively tendency to the contem- 

 plation of nature is interwoven with the whole intellectual 

 cultivation, and with the religious feelings of a nation, great 

 and striking contrasts of season, of vegetation, or of eleva- 

 tion, are unfailing stimulants to the poetic imagination. 



Delight in nature, inseparable from the tendency to objec- 

 tive contemplation which belongs to the Germanic nations, 

 shews itself in a high degree in the earliest poetry of the 

 middle ages. Of this the chivalric poems of the Minne- 

 singers during the Hohenstauffen period afford us numerous 

 examples. Many and varied as are its points of contact 

 with the romanesque poetry of the Proven 9als, yet its true 

 Germanic principle can never be mistaken. A deep felt and 

 all pervading love of nature may be discerned in all Ger- 

 manic manners, habits, and modes of life ; and even in the 

 love of freedom characteristic of the race( 52 ). The wander- 

 ing Minnesingers, or minstrels, though living much in 

 courtly circles (from which, indeed, they often sprang), still 

 maintained frequent and intimate intercourse with nature, 

 and preserved, in all its freshness, an idyllic, and often an 

 elegiac, turn of thought. I avail myself on these subjects 

 of the researches of those most profoundly versed in the 

 history and literature of our German middle ages, my noble- 

 minded friends Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. " The poets of 

 our country of that period/' says the last named writer, 

 "never gave separate descriptions of natural scenery designed 

 solely to represent, in brilliant colours, the impression of 

 the landscape 011 the mind. Assuredly the eye and the 



