George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[31] Ischl was not the fashionable watering-place it has since become, and this whole journey from Vienna to Munich was then so rarely made, that its beauties were almost unknown, except to Germans. The facilities and comforts of travelling were proportionately small, but there was compensation, not only in the wonderful scenery, but in the freedom from the presence of tourists.

July 12.—It has been a perfectly clear and beautiful day, and we have used it to make an excursion of about fifteen miles into the mountains, to see the valley and lake of Gosau, and the Dachstein or Thorstein Mountain, with its glacier. . . . . At first we followed the Traun to the point where it comes out of the beautiful lake of Hall-stadt, along which we drove for a mile, and then turned into the wild valley of the Gosau, a small mountain stream which came rushing down between opposing rocks that rose, generally, on each side some hundred feet, and sometimes one or two thousand feet above our heads. Through this narrow pass we continued to ascend for about an hour, with the Gosau tumbling and foaming by our side, until at last the whole spread out into a rich and beautiful valley, containing thirteen hundred inhabitants, nearly all Protestants . . . . . We stopped at a sort of rude inn, kept by an old woman who reminded us of Meg Merrilies, . . . . and then traversing the whole of this fertile valley, came to where it is closed up by the mountain, and where the road finally ceases. Here we left our caleche, and, taking a couple of chairs with eight men to carry us, began to ascend the mountain. The views were very grand. As we rose we passed round a sort of promontory in the hills, and then into a gorge where the Donner Kegel, or Thunderpeaks, seemed absolutely to overhang our heads at the height of two or three thousand feet; and still clinging to the wild torrent of the Gosau, at the end of an hour we reached the lake from which it flows. It is about a mile long, and a quarter of a mile wide, shut in by mountains on all sides, of which the Dachstein rose directly in front of us, 9,448 feet above the ocean, with a glacier about three miles long distinctly before us, and so near that its waters keep the lake almost down to the freezing-point. It is a very grand and very picturesque view. . . . .

In the evening I went to the Ischl theatre, . . . . where the acting was quite as bad as I expected to find it; but I went merely because I saw a piece translated from the Spanish announced, More-to's Desden con el Deaden, under the name of Die Prinzessin Diana,