I shall never forget the shock to my feelings when, shortly after leaving Transylvania, I went to spend the summer months in the much-famed Wienerwald near Vienna. In former years I had often visited this neighborhood, and had even retained of it very pleasant recollections; but now, fresh from the wild charm of undefiled and undesecrated nature, the Wienerwald and everything about it appeared in the light of a pitiable farce. In fact, I do not think I had ever rightly appreciated the Transylvanian mountain scenery till forced to compare it with another landscape.

The country about Vienna—of which its natives are so proud—is beautiful, it is true, or rather it has been beautiful once; but, alas! how much of its charm has been destroyed by that terrible Versch?nerungs Verein (Beautifying Association), as those noisome institutions are called, loathsome abortions of a diseased German brain, which{378} have the object of teaching unfortunate mankind to appreciate the beauties of nature in the only correct fashion authorized by science.

Viewed in the abstract, an ignorant stranger unacquainted with the habits of the country might be prone to imagine taking a walk up any of those beautiful wooded hills to be a comparatively simple matter, provided his lungs and his chaussure be in adequate walking trim. Ridiculous error! to be speedily rectified by painful experience before you have spent many days in the neighborhood of the Austrian capital. It is here not a question of boots, but of books; of science, not of soles; your lungs are useless unless your mind be rightly adjusted; and the latest edition of Meyer’s “Conversations Lexicon” will be far more necessary to fit you for a walk in the Wienerwald than a pair of Euknemida walking-shoes.

To go into a civilized Austrian forest requires at least as much preparation as to enter a fashionable ball-room; and unless you have been thoroughly grounded in contemporary literature, general history, and the biographies of celebrated men, you had far better stay at home.

There you are not left to yourself to make acquaintance with trees and flowers, as your ignorant rustic fashion has hitherto been; but your exact relations to the botanical world around you are precisely defined from the very outset. At every step you make you are overwhelmed with alternate doses of advice, admonition, entreaty, or threat; but never, never by any chance are you left to your own devices! You cannot feel as if you were alone even in the most hidden depths of the forest, for the tormenting spirit of the Versch?nerungs Verein will insist on following you about step by step, its jarring voice ever breaking in on your most secret reveries. It warns you not to tread on the grass; it entreats you to spare the pine-cones; it instructs you to avoid meddling with the toadstools; it recommends the flowers to your protection; it advises you to be careful with your cigar-ashes; it commands you to muzzle your unhappy terrier; it weighs you down with a crushing sense of your own unworthiness by appealing to your sense of honor, of probity, of refinement, of patriotism, and to a hundred other noble qualities you are acutely conscious of not possessing; then passing from fawning flattery to brutal menace, it growls dark threats against your liberty or your purse, should you have remained deaf to its hateful voice, and presume to h............