Numberless country-seats were built a hundred years ago in barren
tedious plains, and the builders thought that by so doing they had
chosen the most beautiful situation imaginable; whereas the old baronial
castles, in the most charming mountainous regions, were allowed to decay
and go to ruin because they were not situated "delectably enough." The
Bavarian Electors at that time not only laid out splendid summer
residences and state gardens in the dreary woody and marshy plains of
Nymphenburg and Schleissheim, but Max Emanuel even went so far as to
have another artificial desert expressly constructed in the middle of
one of these gardens--whose walls are already surrounded by the natural
desert. Karl Theodor of the Palatinate built his Schwetzinger garden two
hours away from the magnificent dales of Heidelberg, in the midst of the
most monotonous kind of plain. Only let a region be fairly level and
treeless, and immediately men were bold enough to imagine that it would
be possible to conjure up there, the most delightful of landscapes.
Even fifty years ago the upper Rhine valley--which is by no means
without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness--was
considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle
course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor
of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of
contrast.
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