In Bible vignettes of the eighteenth century, Paradise—­which is the archetype of the virgin splendor of nature—­is depicted as a flat tiresome garden entirely without elevations of any kind, in which the dear God has already begun to correct his own handiwork, and with the shears of a French gardener has carved out from the clumps of trees, straight avenues, pyramids, and the like.  In older wood-carvings, on the other hand, Paradise is represented as a gradually rising wilderness where Adam’s path is blocked by overhanging masses of rock which contrast strangely with the conception of natural life devoid of all labor and danger.  Our fathers often saw in a charming, rich, and fertile region a picture of Paradise, whereas we are far more likely in a primeval wilderness to exclaim with the medieval masters: 

  “The lofty works, uncomprehended,
   Are bright as on the earliest day.”

In the landscapes of medieval pictures one scarcely ever sees the woods painted.  Can the thin foliage of the trees of the old Italians, which look as though the leaves on them had been counted, be entirely explained by lack of technique?  The generation of those days surely had a very different archetype of the intact, uncontaminated splendor of the forest than is possessed by us, for whom there remains scarcely anything but a cultivated forest ravaged by the axe and inclosed within boundaries fixed by rule and measure.  The medieval poets felt deeply enough the poetic beauty of the forest, but men saw it with the appreciative eye of the artist only when they had gone away from the forest, when they had become more unfamiliar with it, and the woods themselves had begun to disappear.  Thus the peasant in the folk-song knows how to reveal poetically many a tender charm of the beauty of nature; but, on the other hand, he very seldom has an eye for the picturesque beauty of natural scenery.  As regards the latter it is with him as with the late Pastor Schmidt of Werneuchen who when describing in hexameters the spectacle of a barley field to the Berliners, called it “a marvelous view.”  When the forest was still the rule in Germany and the field the exception, the uprooted parts of the forest, the oases of cleared land, the free open spaces, undoubtedly passed for the most attractive landscapes; whereas we, who have acquired too much of the open, are more attracted by the oases of the forest shade.

Only he who takes this into consideration can understand for example, how it is possible that the palace of Charlemagne at Ingelheim could have passed for a perfect country-seat, situated in what must have been considered in those days an extremely charming and picturesque spot.  Seen through modern eyes these plains of the left bank of the Rhine with their fields, vineyards, sandy wastes and stunted pine-woods are intensely uninteresting, and one fails to comprehend why an emperor should have chosen Ingelheim as a country-seat, when he needed only to cross the river, or to proceed down