I was pleasantly disappointed ...

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor

Quotes from the same author

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor
Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor
So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor
I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor
The Prophet's words were true; The mouth of Ali is the golden door Of Wisdom." When his friends to Ali bore These words, he smiled and said: "And should they ask The same until my dying day, the task Were easy; for the stream from Wisdom's well, Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.
 See image
 Bayard Taylor