Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/377

Rh in Leipzig, accompanied his friend Adam Olearius on an embassy to Russia and to Persia. Fleming composed Latin poems, and translated from Latin, French, Dutch, and Italian. His German poems are in the classical forms which Opitz recommended—odes, songs, sonnets, epithalamia, epicedes,—and are amorous, religious, and occasional. But the spirit of Fleming's poetry is not pedantic, but sincere and natural. "An heitrer Naturwahrheit," says Goedeke, "steht er allen Dichtern des Jahrhunderts voran." His is the beautiful "Lass dich nur nichts dauren                                    Mit Trauren,                                           Sei stille,                          Wie Gott es fügt,                           So sei vergnügt,                                          Mein Wille." There is more fire in Fleming's songs than in those of the elegiac Dach, and the lines he wrote on his death-bed have the confidence without the arrogance of Landor's "Mein Schall floh über welt, kein Landsman sang mir gleich, Von Reisen hochgepreist, für keiner Mühe bleich,  Jung, wachsam, unbesorgt.  Man wird mich nennen hören  Bis dass die letzte Glut dies Alles wird verstören." In religious poetry, strengthening, consoling, and at times mystical, the spirit of the German people found its most natural expression during years of endless war and suffering. Some of it shows the influence of Opitz's artificialities and refinements, as for example the religious pastorals of