Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/203

200 nymph, who has the showing of the Bezauberte Hole (Enchanted Cave); but, no; you shall not see that with our eyes, but read Sir Francis Head's description of it, which proves that, if he has any right to designate himself as "the old man," time has not done its sad work in abating the fervours of his imagination. He has made a prodigious bubble of this cave. His "subterranean passage" was, to our disenchanted vision, but a walled way on upper earth; and where he looked through fissures of the rock, we had but the prose of windows, whose shutters were slammed open by our Dulcinean wood-nymph. But never mind! long may he live to verify the fantastical figure in the vignette to the Frankfort edition of his charming work, to walk over the world blowing bubbles so filled with the breath of genius and benevolence that they diffuse sweet odours wherever they float.

See us now standing at the Rossel, looking with the feeling of parting lovers at the queenly Rheinstein sitting on her throne of Nature's masonry—at a long reach of the river up and down—at the lovely Nahe; not merely at its graceful entrance into the Rhine, but far, far away as it comes serenely gliding along its deep-sunken channel from its mountain-home—at Drusus' bridge, with its misty light of another age and people—at the massy ruin of Ehrenfels under our feet—at the Mouse Tower of old Bishop Hatto on its pretty island—at vineyards without number—at hills sloping to hills, at the green ravines between them, and the roads that traverse