He spent part of May on the Upper Rhine between Basle and Schaffhausen, June and half of July on the St.Gothard route and at Bellinzona.

In reflecting over the sources of Swiss character, as connected with the question of the nature of art and its origin in morality, he was struck with the fact that all the virtues of the Swiss did not make them artistic.

Compared with most nations they were as children in painting, music and poetry.

And, indeed, they ranked with the early phases of many great nations--the period of pristine simplicity "uncorrupted by the arts." From Bellinzona he went to Turin on his way to the Vaudois Valleys, where he meant to compare the Waldensian Protestants with the Swiss.
Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese's "Queen of Sheba" and other Venetian pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age.

He grasped a clue to the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of pleasure.