We had left our beautiful valley here; and, as is too often the case, in a region of transition from mountain to plain, the soil is marshy and the district unhealthy. There was a large, new-built, clean hotel at Neumarkt; but though the rooms were good, the living was intolerably bad, so that we went nearly supperless to bed.
Still we approached Italy; the hills were covered with vines, the road shut in by the walls of vineyards. Various valleys branch off at intervals, all affording the scenery peculiar to the Tyrol. I own I had no desire to linger longer in this land: we had continued for so many days among ravines, defiles, and narrow valleys, peering up at the sky from the depths between mountains, that the eye grew eager for a view of heaven, and yearned to behold a more extensive horizon. When the bourne of a journey lies beyond, the desire to linger, even in beautiful scenery, is weak. Since I had left Gmunden and Salzburg I had experienced no desire to stop short.
Some names of cities are so familiar, that one forms an idea of them in one’s mind as one does of a celebrated, but personally unknown, individual. The Council of Trent is associated with cardinals and bishops—shepherds of the church, legislators of
