ought 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 that by ingeniously planting straight rows and
circles of trees carefully pruned with the shears they had at least
imparted to the spot some sort of artistic _raison d'etre_. Today, on
the contrary, Schlangenbad is considered one of the mast beautifully
situated baths in Germany; the "dreariness" and "desolation" we now call
romantic and picturesque, and the fact that in this spot nothing grows
but "grass and leaves"--that is to say, that the fragrant meadow-land
starts right before the door, and that the green boughs of the forest
peep in everywhere at the windows--this perhaps attracts as many guests
at present as the efficacy of the mineral spring.

The artists of the Middle Ages thought that they could give no more
beautiful background to their historical paintings and half-length
portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and
jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely
enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the
likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free
Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren
mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty,
while, a few centuries later, suc