No, these places have indeed a singularly peaceful attractiveness, and if I prefer them, as a child of the century, to real mountains, there was a time when the artist's eye would have given them the preference over the grand landscapes of the Alpine world.
At the beginning of the last century the latter were considered repelling.

They oppressed the soul by their immensity.

No painter then undertook to depict giant mountains with eternal snow upon summits which towered above the clouds.

A Salvator Rosa or Poussin, or even the great Ruysdael, would have preferred to set up his easel at the Pichelsbergen or in the country about Potsdam, rather than at the foot of Mont Blanc, the Kunigssee, or the Eibsee, in which the rocks of the Zugspitze--my vis-a-vis at Tutzingen--are magnificently reflected.
There is nothing more beautiful than the moderate, finely rounded heights at these peaceful spots rich in vegetation and in water, when gilded by the fading light of a lovely summer evening or illumined by the rosy tinge of the afterglow.

Many of our later German painters have learned to value the charm of such a subject, while of our writers Fontane has seized and very happily rendered all their witchery.