When the foreigner looks out to the south from Munich on bright days, in the far distance silvery high plateaus shine toward his astonished eyes, seeming to float in the air without roots in the earth. Never has he seen anything like this in the north, nor in the mountain heights of Thuringia or of the more serious Black Forest, never has his untrained fantasy reflected something so great and quietly powerful. These are the glaciers and the snowy peaks of the Tyrol. Wonderful, beautiful, and powerful at the same time, are the glaciers and snowy peaks of the Tyrol. Wonderful, beautiful, and powerful, all together; Nature builds gradually, when one rises upward from the serene places of the golden Au, over the soft hills of Thuringia, to the bolder lines of the Odenwald, the darker riddles of the Black Forest, in which a strong race passes its life in a combination of strict and solitary work and fairy-tale like dreaming. From there the path then leads to the powerful foothills of Switzerland, which to the east bear the name of Tyrol. The commanding peaks of this entire massif, Switzerland with its crowning Mont Blanc, I would see only later.

This time those silvery heights winked, and drew me irresistibly toward them.

How might I wrap myself in silence here? may I be permitted only a few fleeting words of observation.

First, it was in the valleys that lead to Parthenkirchen that I would learn how deceptive, for those only used to the northern plains, all sense of perspective becomes in the clear mountain air of the South. What seemed a small hill, perhaps a half-hour distant, demanded, in gradually diminishing illusion, six hours of road, and grew to a mighty mountain massif, which seemed to push its way in amidst the still mightier walls of mountains on either side. High over the bottom of the valley, in which, passing by fields and meadows, the road led through handsome villages, a second row of villages looked down, arranged upon sizable peaks, with their cemeteries next to them. If the entire view was already full of pleasure and life, and so broadly spread out, that the eye could find no boundary upon which to rest from all the excitement, yet the cemeteries as well had their part to contribute to the fairy-tale-like scene.