Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland

In the summer of 1828 James Fenimore Cooper, his wife, and their five children set out from Paris for Switzerland, and Cooper wrote that he experienced a "glorious anticipation," for "a common-place converse with men was about to give place to a sublime communion with Nature."

Sketches of Switzerland, the book which describes this experience and which is republished here for the first time in the United States since its original issue in 1836, was the first of five European travel books writ...