Both journey and book came at an important time in his life. Thereafter the gift for natural description and for the "felt" characterization which distinguishes his fiction was so broadly used as to make him geographically the most universal English writer of this century.In August, 1912, Lawrence and Frieda, then Mrs. Ernest Weekley, walked south from Icking, near Munich, to Riva on Lago di Garda, which was then in Austrian territory, and later, in September, to the Italian Gargnano, farther down the lake. They stayed there till April 1913, while Lawrence worked at his writing as he had not previously been able to do. There he completed the final draft of SONS AND LOVERS, wrote the German stories, collected in THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER, and began the poems published in LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH. To this versatile performance he added the first versions of the travel essays published in first the English Review and in 1916 as TWILIGHT IN ITALY.The first of the essays deals with a walking trip in the Tyrol before the journey south to Italy; it is entitled "The Crucifix Across the Mountains." The key word "strange" is employed on the first page and thereafter frequently, for that was not only a strange country in its people and its language, but also in customs, such as wayside crucifixes, new to Lawrence's Congregationalism. The different forms of these fixed objects allow Lawrence's fancy to bring each to life; the essay becomes a portrait gallery of pitiable, terrifying, beautiful, violated, male Messiahs who suffered hideously for bringing their message. The significance of this gallery in Lawrence's work need not be stressed.The release of Lawrence's fancy on strange objects stemmed from his decision not to return to teaching after his illness in 1911 and 1912, but to live by his pen. This courageous decision gave him three novel sensations in Gargnana. He was living with Frieda as a married man, his time was his own, and he was in a foreign country. He completed several old manuscripts which would be published in the next two or three years and he began new work. The completion of SONS AND LOVERS marked the first stage in his withdrawal from his Nottinghamshire material, a withdrawal.