The Frenchified lyric poets of the school of Hagedorn and Gleim sing
forest-songs, as though they longed after the forest from hearsay. Then,
with the resurrected folk-song and the resuscitated Shakespeare, who has
poetically explored deeper into the glory of the forest than all others,
the English art of gardening, an imitation of the free nature of the
forest, reaches Germany. At the same time, in German poetry, Goethe
again strikes the true forest-note which he has learned from the
folk-song; and from the moment that the forest no longer appears too
disorderly for the poets, the coarse, vigorous national life no longer
seems to them too dirty and rugged for artistic treatment. The most
recent and splendid revival of landscape painting is intimately
connected with the renewed absorption of the artist in the study of the
forest. We also find that, at the time when Goethe was writing his best
songs, Mozart and Haydn were, with equal enthusiasm, composing music for
the folk-song, as if they had "learned it listening to the birds" that
is to say, to the birds in the woods, not, like one of the new branch
schools of romantic miniature poets, to the birds singing their sickly
songs in gilded cages in a parlor.
The forest alone permits us civilized men to enjoy the dream of a
personal freedom undisturbed by the surveillance of the police. There at
least one can ramble about as one will, without being bound to keep to
the common patented high road.
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