e country around Berlin is considered hopelessly ugly, but with great
injustice. I have convinced myself since that I do not look back as
fondly on the Pichelsbergen and the Havelufer at Potsdam, where it was
granted us to pass such happy hours in the springtime of life, because
the force of imagination has clothed them with fancied charms. No, these
places have indeed a singularly peaceful attractiveness, and if I prefer
them, as a child of the century, to real mountains, there was a time when
the artist's eye would have given them the preference over the grand
landscapes of the Alpine world.

At the beginning of the last century the latter were considered
repelling. They oppressed the soul by their immensity. No painter then
undertook to depict giant mountains with eternal snow upon summits which
towered above the clouds. A Salvator Rosa or Poussin, or even the great
Ruysdael, would have preferred to set up his easel at the Pichelsbergen
or in the country about Potsdam, rather than at the foot of Mont Blanc,
the Kunigssee, or the Eibsee, in which the rocks of the Zugspitze--my
vis-a-vis at Tutzingen--are magnificently reflected.

There is nothing more beautiful than the moderate, finely rounded heights
at these peaceful spots rich in vegetation and in water, when gilded by
the fading light of a lovely summer evening or illumined by the rosy
tinge of the afterglow. Many of our later German painters have learned to
value the charm of such a subject, while of our writers Fontane has
seized and very happily rendered all their witchery. At my brother Ludo's
manorhouse on the banks of the Dahme, at his place Dolgenbrodt, in Mark
Brandenburg, Fontane experienced all the attraction of the plain, which I
have never felt more deeply than in that very spot and on a certain
evening at Potsdam when the bells of the little church of Sakrow seemed
to bid farewell to the sinking sun and invite him to return.

In the East I have seen the day-star set more brilliantly, but never met
with a more harmonious and lovely splendour of colour than on summer
evenings in the Mark, except in Holland on the shore of the North Sea.

Can I ever forget those festal days when, after saying our little
congratulatory verses to our mother, and admiring her birthday table,
which her friends always loaded with flowers, we awaited the carriages
that were to take us into the country? Besides a great excursion wagon,
there were generally some other coaches