Now the Spring comes, the vital sap of my affections rises as in a tree! And what a gloomy Spring! But a few days ago all the new buds were covered with snow ; and everything yet looks so brown and wintry, that yesterday the roses (which the ladies carried on the ramparts, their promenade), beautiful as they were, so little harmonized with the general face of nature, that they looked to me like silk and made roses. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Letter to Thomas Poole from Göttingen, dated 'May 6, 1799, Monday morn.' Source: https://archive.org/details/letters01cole/page/296/mode/2up

Göttingen from the South West - an colored copper-plate etching, dated 1791. Overwiew of the town, a few church spires, red roofs behind the fortifications. The Leine in the foreground, green pastures with cows, and quite a few people in the fields - all is green. The season may well be spring. Behind the town bald hills towards Northeast - Hainberg, Nikolausberg, which are now woodland. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goettingen_von_Suedwest.png

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Romantic Landscapes (37)
#UrbanPromenades #Coleridge #Göttingen #RomanticLandscapes

May 6, 1799, S.T. Coleridge remarks on the habit of taking promenades on the old fortifications of the small university town Göttingen - and the dismal spring in that year with snow up to May.