wild scenery, provided it be not too
wild. But if he consider it too savage, he sets to work to tame it. I
remember, in the neighbourhood of Dresden, discovering a picturesque and
narrow valley leading down towards the Elbe. The winding roadway ran
beside a mountain torrent, which for a mile or so fretted and foamed over
rocks and boulders between wood-covered banks. I followed it enchanted
until, turning a corner, I suddenly came across a gang of eighty or a
hundred workmen. They were busy tidying up that valley, and making that
stream respectable. All the stones that were impeding the course of the
water they were carefully picking out and carting away. The bank on
either side they were bricking up and cementing. The overhanging trees
and bushes, the tangled vines and creepers they were rooting up and
trimming down. A little further I came upon the finished work--the
mountain valley as it ought to be, according to German ideas. The water,
now a broad, sluggish stream, flowed over a level, gravelly bed, between
two walls crowned with stone coping. At every hundred yards it gently
descended down three shallow wooden platforms. For a space on either
side the ground had been cleared, and at regular intervals young poplars
planted. Each sapling was protected by a shield of wickerwork and bossed
by an iron rod. In the course of a couple of years it is the hope of the
local council to have "finished" that valley throughout its entire
length, and made it fit for a tidy-minded lover of German nature to walk
in. There will be a seat every fifty yards, a police notice every
hundred, and a restaurant every half-mile.

They are doing the same from the Memel to the Rhine. They are just
tidying up the country. I remember well the Wehrthal. It was once the
most romantic ravine to be found in the Black Forest. The last time I
walked down it some hundreds of Italian workmen were encamped there hard
at work, training the wild little Wehr the way it should go, bricking the
banks for it here, blasting the rocks for it there, making cement steps
for it down which it can travel soberly and without fuss.

For in Germany there is no nonsense talked about untrammelled nature. In
Germany nature has got to behave herself, and not set a bad example to
the children. A German poet, noticing waters coming down as Southey
describes, somewhat inexactly, the waters coming down at Lodore, would be
too shocked to stop and write allit