as by a thousand moving stars, charms the night by its delicate effluvia, brilliant lightnings play incessantly on the horizon, and elevate the mind in joyful admiration to the stars, which, glowing in solemn silence in the firmament above the continent and ocean, fill the soul with a presentiment of still sublimer wonders.

Travels by sea were described at much greater length and with much more effusion than travels by land; one might infer from the silence of the people who moved about in Europe in the eighteenth century, that no love of Nature existed.  The extreme discomfort of the road up to a hundred years ago may account for this silence within Germany.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1716 of Saxon Switzerland: 

We passed by moonshine the frightful precipices that divide Bohemia from Saxony, at the bottom of which runs the river Elbe ... in many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern an inch of space between the wheels and the precipice....

and her husband declared that

    he had passed the Alps five times in different places, without
    having gone a road so dangerous.

Scherr relates that in the late autumn of 1721 a citizen of Schwabisch-Gmuend travelled to Ellwangen, a distance of eight hours’ posting.

Before starting, he had a mass performed in St John’s Church ’for the safe conclusion of the coming journey.’  He set off one Monday with his wife and a maid in a two-horse vehicle called a small tilt waggon (Planwaegelchen), but in less than an hour the wheels stuck in mud, and the whole party had to get out and push the carriage, up to their knees in filth.  In the middle of the village of Boebingen the driver inadvertently drove the front left wheel into a manure hole, the carriage was overturned, and the lady of the party had her nose and cheek badly grazed by the iron hoops.

From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, and yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend the night there.  Next morning they set off early, and reached the village of Hofen by mid-day without accidents.  Here for a time the travelling ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the carriage fell into a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the maid’s right shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant’s hand injured.  The axle of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse completely lamed in the left forefoot.  They had to put up a second time for the night, leave horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, and hire a rack waggon, in which at last, pitifully shaken, they reached the gates of Ellwangen on Wednesday at vesper bells.

When Eva Koenig, Lessing’s fiancee, was on her way from Brunswick to Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf (two miles north of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows: