ed
fishing festival at Stralau.

But the crowning expedition of all was on our mother's birthday,
either to the Pichelsbergen, wooded hills mirrored in ponds where fish
abounded, or to the Pfaueninsel at Potsdam.

The 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 mo