attire, and rejoice in that which they have caused to be created. Possibly these quays and houses and lindens and Englishmen would be excellent in their way anywhere else, but here they seem discordant amid this strangely grandiose and at the same time indescribably harmonious and smiling nature.
As soon as I went up to my room, and opened the window facing the lake, the beauty of the sheet of water, of these mountains, and of this sky, at the first moment literally dazzled and overwhelmed me. I experienced an inward unrest, and the necessity of expressing in some manner the feelings that suddenly filled my soul to overflowing. I felt a desire to embrace, powerfully to embrace, someone, to tickle him, or to pinch him; in short, to do to him and to myself something extraordinary.
It was seven o’clock in the evening. The rain had been falling all day, but now it had cleared off.
The lake, blue as heated sulphur, spread out before my windows smooth and motionless, like a concave mirror between the variegated green shores; its surface was dotted with boats, which left behind them vanishing trails. Farther away it was contracted between two monstrous headlands, and, darkling, set itself against and disappeared behind a confused pile of mountains, clouds, and glaciers. In the foreground stretched a panorama of moist, fresh green shores, with reeds, meadows, gardens, and villas. Farther away, the dark-green wooded heights, crowned with the ruins of feudal castles; in the background, the rolling, pale-lilac-colored vista of mountains, with fantastic peaks built up of crags and dead white mounds of snow. And everything was bathed in a fresh, transparent atmosphere of azure blue, and kindled by the warm rays of the setting sun, bursting forth through the riven skies.
Not on the lake nor on the mountains nor in the skies was there a single completed line, a single unmixed color, a single moment of repose;