Explore "Two Years Ago, Volume II" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is, perhaps, a pity for the human race in general, that some enterprising company cannot buy up the Moselle (not the wine, but the river), cut it into five-mile lengths, and distribute them over Europe, wherever there is a demand for lovely scenery. For lovely is its proper epithet; it is not grand, not exciting -- so much the better; it is scenery to live and die in; scenery to settle in, and study a single landscape, till you know every rock, and walnut-tree, and vine-leaf by heart: not merely to run through in one hasty steam-trip, as you now do, in a long burning day, which makes you not "drunk" -- but weary -- "with excess of beauty. " Besides, there are two or three points so superior to the rest, that having seen them, one cares to see nothing more.
That paradise of emerald, purple, and azure, which opens behind Treis; and that strange heap of old-world houses at Berncastle, which have scrambled up to the top of a rock to stare at the steamer, and have never been able to get down again -- between them, and after them, one feels like a child who, after a great mouthful of pine-apple jam, is condemned to have poured down its throat an everlasting stream of treacle.