I acquired some idea of
Berlin, which was then still only the capital of Prussia, and in
population corresponded to the Copenhagen of our day; I spent a few
weeks in Dresden, where I felt very much at home, delighted in the
exquisite art collection and derived no small pleasure from the theatre,
at that time an excellent one. I saw Prague for the first time,
worshipped Rubens in Munich, and, with him specially in my mind, tried
to realise how the greatest painters had regarded Life. Switzerland
added to my store of impressions with grand natural spectacles. I saw
the Alps, and a thunderstorm in the Alps, passed starlit nights on the
Swiss lakes, traced the courses of foaming mountain streams such as the
Tamina at Pfaeffers, ascended the Rigi at a silly forced march, and from
the Kulm saw a procession of clouds that gripped my fancy like the
procession of the Vanir in Northern mythology. Many years afterwards I
described it in the Fourth volume of _Main Currents_. From
Interlaken I gazed on the whiteness of the Jungfrau, but scarcely with
greater emotion than once upon a time when I had gazed at the white
cliffs of Moeen. On my homeward journey I saw Heidelberg's lovely ruins,
to which Charles V.'s castle, near the Al-hambra, makes a marvellous
pendant, Strassburg's grave Cathedral, and Goethe's house at Frankfurt.
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