George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[34] recent patronage of art, by the reigning King, Ludwig I., whom Mr. Ticknor had seen as Crown Prince in earlier days in Rome. A letter to Mr. Daveis, written some weeks afterwards, gives a concise summary of this part of the summer's travels.

. . . . From Vienna we went up the Danube into Upper Austria, Salzburg, etc., on the whole the loveliest and most picturesque, though not the grandest country I have yet seen. . . . . At length, after a month spent so delightfully among the valleys and lakes, and surrounded with the snow-clad mountains of Upper Austria, we turned to Munich. There we passed a week, which was quite filled with visits to the many fine buildings erected by the present King of Bavaria, and to the numberless fresco-paintings with which he has covered their walls. The Glyptothek——an affected name for a statuegallery—is, on the whole, the most beautiful, merely beautiful building I ever saw; and there is a school of painting there, which, for the wideness and boldness of its range, and the number of artists attached to it, is a phenomenon the world has not seen since the days of Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. It has already done a great deal, and if it continues to thrive for forty or fifty years more, as it has for the last twenty, so that there will be time for it to settle and ripen, to assume its proper character and reach its appropriate finish, it will produce works that will revive the great period of the art. But it seems to me as if the spirit of the times were against it, and as if ‘an age too late,’ of which Milton fancied he felt the influences, were indeed to prevent the ripening of these magnificent attempts. And perhaps it is better it should be so; perhaps the world is grown so old and so wise, perhaps moral culture is so far advanced, that more can be done for human nature than by such costly patronage of the arts. At least, in Bavaria it is obtained at much too dear a cost. . . . .

From Munich we intended to have plunged at once into the mountains of the Tyrol, but that was precisely the country that was most infected with the cholera, and a system of cordons was at once established, that made it out of the question to think of penetrating into the Peninsula on that side. This sent us into Switzerland, where we intended to have gone next year, on leaving Italy . . . . . I think the Jungfrau, as seen from the high pass of the Wengern Alp,—where, in the solitudes of nature, you stand, as it were, in the immediate presence of one of the grandest and most glorious works of God,—produces more religious feelings and associations than anything I ever witnessed, which belonged to merely physical existence. . . . .