On grounds deducible from the above, neither the instructive nor the descriptive type is secured in the exclusive one-sidedness which would obliterate every vestige of art, and we find in the one case that the external reality is brought into appreciable relation with that which is seized by mind as significance, just as conversely in the other the abstract universal is related to its concrete mode of appearance.
(_a_) We have already explained how this is so in the case of the didactic poem. Without depicting external conditions and particular phenomena, without the episodical narration of mythological and other illustrations we shall rarely find a genuine example of it. By means, however, of a parallel series of this character in which the universal for mind is thus laid alongside of the particular object of sense we have merely a quite collateral relation set up instead of a union carried out in every detail, a parallelogism, moreover, which does not affect the entire content and its all-embracing artistic form, but merely isolated aspects and traits.
(_b_) Such a modicum of true relation is particularly conspicuous in the case of descriptive poetry, in so far as its delineations are accompanied with such emotions as the sight of natural landscape, the course of the days and seasons, a wooded hill, a lake, a babbling brook, a church, a picturesquely situated village and the poor man's peaceful cottage are likely to arouse. We find consequently in descriptive poetry much as we do in the didactic poem episodes which, although merely accessory, animate us, in particular through the reflection of affecting emotions, such as a tender melancholy or little touches of occasional experience taken from the more homely levels of life. Such an association of spiritual feeling with the external facts of Nature can still only too easily in this type of poetry remain wholly external in its presentation. For the natural or local condition is here assumed to be something which quite independently confronts us. Man no doubt draws near to it; under its influence he entertains this or that feeling, but there is nothing which essentially unites moonlight, forests, valleys, landscape, and so on, with the emotions of the soul they excite. I am not here either the interpreter or the animating focus of Nature, but feel, as each happens to confront me, a wholly indefinite kind of harmonious reciprocity establish itself between the objects I face and the emotional life which they stimulate. Most of all are we Germans devoted to this type of picturesque description, and along with it to every variety of exquisite feeling and heart effervescence such natural scenery can possibly evoke. It is a public high-road over which all may march in line. Even some of the odes of Klopstock are tuned to its key.