There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, about great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and buck, cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the ‘regio montana’; for example, in von Aribo’s Vita S. Emmerani.  When the Alps became more frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a political bridge came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made and the whole region was better known—­in fact, early in mediaeval times, not only political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life spread its threads over a great part of the known world, and began to bind the lives of nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained terra incognita to dwellers far and near.

We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbe Majolus v.  Clugny (970), Bernard v.  Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v.  Mailand, Anno v.  Coeln[5], but without a trace of orography.  They scarcely refer to the snow and glacier regions from the side of physical geography, or even of aesthetic feeling; and do not mention the mountain monarchs so familiar to-day—­Mt.  Blanc, the Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, etc.—­which were of no value to their life, practical or scientific.  These writers record nothing but names of places and their own troubles and dangers in travelling, especially in winter.  And even at the end of the fifteenth century, German travels across the Alps were written in the same strain—­for example, the account of the voyage of the Elector-Palatine Alexander v.  Zweibruecken and Count Joh.  Ludwig zu Nassau (1495-96) from Zurich Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee:  ’This is the real Switzerland; has few villages, just a house here and a house there, but beautiful meadows, much cattle, and very high mountains, on which snow lies, which falls before Christmas, and is as hard as any rock.’  As an exception to this we have a vivid and poetic description of the famous Verona Pass in Latin verse by Guntherus Ligurinus.

Guenther’s description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal experience.  This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a belated echo of Fortunatus.

We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have so often stated, mediaeval Germany stood high above antiquity in this respect.  Gervinus, a classic example on the last point, in the section of his history of German poetry which treats of the difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand, and Esop’s and the Oriental on the other, said: