attainable only by the eye,
not by the foot, of themselves half belong to heaven. The landscapes of
the seventeenth century, on the contrary, which are inspired by earthly
beauty pure and simple, have a tendency to flatness, just as in reality
all landscapes lie spread out in length and breadth before us. Classical
antiquity had just as uncultivated an eye for the beauty of the Alps as
the age of Renaissance and the Rococo which emulated it so ardently.
Humboldt mentions that not a single Roman author ever alludes to the
Alps from a descriptive point of view except to complain of their
impassableness and like qualities, and that Julius Caesar employed the
leisure hours of an Alpine journey to complete a dry grammatical
treatise, _De Analogia_.

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