Numberless country-seats were built a hundred years ago in barren tedious plains, and the builders thought that by so doing they had chosen the most beautiful situation imaginable; whereas the old baronial castles, in the most charming mountainous regions, were allowed to decay and go to ruin because they were not situated “delectably enough.”  The Bavarian Electors at that time not only laid out splendid summer residences and state gardens in the dreary woody and marshy plains of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim, but Max Emanuel even went so far as to have another artificial desert expressly constructed in the middle of one of these gardens—­whose walls are already surrounded by the natural desert.  Karl Theodor of the Palatinate built his Schwetzinger garden two hours away from the magnificent dales of Heidelberg, in the midst of the most monotonous kind of plain.  Only let a region be fairly level and treeless, and immediately men were bold enough to imagine that it would be possible to conjure up there, the most delightful of landscapes.

Even fifty years ago the upper Rhine valley—­which is by no means without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness—­was considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of contrast.  In the upper Rheingau at that time they strung out one villa after another; these are now for the most part deserted, while on the formerly neglected tracts of country confined between the mountains a new summer castle is being stuck again on the summit of every rock, or at least the ruins already, hanging there are being made habitable once more.  Our fathers, who thought the upper Rheingau the most beautiful corner of Germany, decorated their rooms with engravings so much in vogue at that time, similar to Claude Lorraine’s broad, open landscapes of far reaching perspective filled with peace and charm.  From this classical ideal of landscape we have come back again to the romantic, and the cupolas of the high mountains have supplanted the leafy temples of Claude’s sacred groves with their background of the infinite sea sparkling in the sunshine.

In the seventeenth century the watering-places situated in the narrow, steep mountain valleys—­many of which have now fallen into decay—­were considered, for the greater part, the most frequented and most beautiful; in the eighteenth century the preference was given to those lying more toward the plain; while in our day the watering-places in the steepest mountains, as in the Black Forest, the Bohemian Mountains, and the Alps, are being sought out on account of their situation.  The court physician of Hesse-Cassel, Weleker, in his description of Schlangenbad, which appeared in 1721, describes the place as situated in a dreary, desolate, forbidding region, in which nothing grows but “leaves and grass,” but he adds