ABSTRACT
Travelers whose eyes had appraised mountains, waterfalls, cathedrals, ruins, scenic variety, and the geometrical environments of cities found the landscape of the interior an agony of monotony. Dreaming, punctuated by successive intrusions upon nature and controlled by the mover's being always a stranger among strangers, affected, travelers guessed, identity, longevity, and society in general. The indescribable scale of the interior seems to have troubled travelers into rejecting it, as did its insistent repetitions of landscape forms, and not least its mood, the state of mind that the interior suggested to—or even promoted in—its observers. Some travelers claimed to have discovered a new happiness on the landscape of the interior, while others experienced extreme melancholy or abrupt shifts and drops of mood. Travelers' attempts to locate on the landscape of the interior scenes that fit such European aesthetic categories as the picturesque always failed.
