Karlsbad to the Brenner

3 September 1786. At three in the morning I stole away from Karlsbad, for otherwise they would not have let me go. My friends, who had so kindly celebrated my birthday on the twenty-eighth of August, probably felt they had a right to keep me; but I could stay no longer. I threw myself, alone, with only a portmanteau and a knapsack, into a post chaise, and arrived at Zwota at half past seven on a fine, misty, quiet morning. I travel under another name, as Herr Möller, a merchant.

Through Eger and Waldsassen I came to Regensburg, which lies beautifully: the place could hardly help drawing a town to it. I watched the Jesuit pupils perform their annual play, and admired again the cleverness of that order, which knows how to join splendour to religion so that the senses are captured. The soil, the rivers, the rocks: everywhere I looked at what the earth is made of, and I resolved not to load myself with stones on this journey. I have the manuscript of Iphigenie with me; Herder urged me to finish it, and I mean to.

Munich, 6 September. In the picture gallery my eye is not yet trained to so many pictures. Rubens's sketches are wonderful. A market woman sold me figs, the first I have had; but the weather is cold and wet, and I long for the south.

Mittenwald, 7 September, evening. The sky cleared, and with it my mind. On the road I fell in with a harper and his little daughter, eleven years old, who had been on a pilgrimage and showed me her new embroidered cap; she told me that when the treble strings of the harp go sharp, the weather is turning fine, and she was right.

On the Brenner, 8 September, evening. Through Scharnitz, Zirl and Innsbruck, where a festival had brought the pilgrims to Wilten, I came up to the pass. Here I watched the clouds gather and dissolve round the summits, and thought about how the mountains make the weather: whether the earth itself has a pulse, a breathing, so that its pull increases and lessens, and the air holds its water or lets it fall. I noted how the plants change as one climbs. The innkeeper at the Brenner wanted me to stay the night; I saw it was because he wanted the horses for his haymaking in the morning; and I left by moonlight.