On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and Lüneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after reading _Emilia_ and _La Nouvelle Héloise_: 'The far-famed Alps, about which so much fuss has been made.' Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature. He did not, as so many would have it--Du Bois Reymond, for example--discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12] In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental and erotic pastorals. He opened up again for his country the taste for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and, above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality and false taste. The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of previous periods of literature. His _Confessions_ opened not only the eyes of France, but the heart. A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of Geneva. As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the country. He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, forgetting the time. 'Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded themselves majestically before my eyes. I gloated over the beautiful spectacle while the sun was setting. At last, too late, I saw that the city gates were shut.' From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men. In the Fourth Book of the _Confessions_ he says, speaking of 1732: