The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times

The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times is by Alfred Biese, an authorized translation from the German. The contents list chapters titled Christianity and Germanism, The Naive Feeling at the Time of the Crusades, Shakespeare's Sympathy for Nature and The Discovery of the Beauty of Landscape in Painting. The text says that, in line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for Nature passed through various stages that can be clearly traced from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions.

The text says the first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were produced in the Netherlands. The text says the delightful animal pictures of Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in the land of Reineke Fuchs. The text says that Schelling's philosophy of Nature called Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind, and that it became the chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher this mind.