There is sky, earth, air, and freedom for your own reflections: a really agreeable kind of Gau; pleasant, though in part ugly.

Large tracts of it are pine-wood, with pleasant Villages and fine arable expanses interspersed.

Schilda and many Villages you leave to right and left.

Old-fashioned Villages, with their village industries visible around; laboring each in its kind,--not too fast; probably with extinct tobacco-pipe hanging over its chin (KALT-RAUCHEND, 'smoking COLD,' as they phrase it).
"Schilda has an absurd celebrity among the Germans: it is the Gotham of Teutschland; a fountain of old broad-grins and homely and hearty rustic banter; welling up from the serious extinct Ages to our own day; 'SCHILTburger' (Inhabitant of SCHILDA) meaning still, among all the Teutsch populations, a man of calmly obstinate whims and delusions, of notions altogether contrary to fact, and agreeable to himself only; resolutely pushing his way through life on those terms: amid horse-laughter, naturally, and general wagging of beards from surrounding mankind.

Extinct mirth, not to be growled at or despised, in Ages running to the shallow, which have lost their mirth, and become all one snigger of mock-mirth.