Gertrude and I Author:Hermann Hesse General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1915 Original Publisher: The International monthly, inc. Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / European / German Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos... more » or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The weeks which I spent in the Alps, I count as almost the happiest of my life. I breathed the pure, clear air; I drank the icy water of the streams; I watched the flocks of goats grazing on the steep precipices, guarded by dark-haired, dreamy, silent shepherds. At times I listened to the storms raging through the valleys, and out of an unaccustomed nearness looked into the very faces of the clouds and mists. In the crevices of rocks, I observed the small, delicate, highly-colored world of flowers and the many beautiful mosses. On clear days I liked to climb for an hour, until beyond the heights, I could see the clear-cut outline of the high mountain peaks, with their blue shadows and luminous silver snowfields. In one place, where the trickling of a stream made it damp, I found on a clear day hundreds of small, blue butterflies. They were drinking of the water and hardly turned aside from my steps or from me. When I roused them they fluttered around me with a little, gentle, silky rustle. After I found them I followed that path every sunny day, and each time found the dense, blue cloud, and each time it was like a festival. I hardly think all of that time was so 'full of sun and of azure and of festivity, as it seems to me in my thoughts. There must have been cloudy days and rainy days, and snow and cold, just as there must have been in me storms and bad moods. But I was not used to solitude and after the first rest and delight was over, somet...« less