It is only in the first moments in which you witness something which is entirely new to you, that you feel that novelty in all its vividness, and perceive really how widely divided is the nature and aspect of what you then contemplate from the objects of your former knowledge. Every hour that you continue to regard what strikes you with its newness, carries off that newness, and your impressions fade and bedim themselves in proportion. You are soon surprised to find how little there is to surprise you; how familiar all about you is become, as if you had conversed with it all your life. This is especially the case in regard to B the novel aspect and manners of a foreign country. It is only by noting down on the spot, and at the moment, what strikes you, that you can secure the force of these first impressions; and when you afterwards refer to these notes, you are often no little astonished to find amid what really curious people and things you are existing, and yet how completely all the strangeness has vanished from your consciousness. In our own country, how much are we struck by the views which foreigners take of us, our native land, and native customs. We seem to behold ourselves as in a magic glass, where expressions of our countenances actually made invisible by daily exposure, are revived and recognised as startling and true. It was this fact which gave such a charm to the Sketch-Book of Washington Irving, and caused the Letters of Prince Pückler Muscau to be read with such avidity. As I wish to introduce my readers to Germany exactly in the manner in which I was introduced to it myself, and as they would first see it, and afterwards gradually grow acquainted with it, I shall devote a chapter or two, in the opening of this volume, to the description of my own first impressions then and there noted down. My entrance to the country was by the Rhine, the way by which the great bulk of travellers enter it, and certainly the most beautiful and impressive of all. You are thus introduced, at once, to that class of its natural scenery in which its natural beauty lies, its mountains and its rivers. Amongst these again, you behold, considered in all points of view, its noblest river, and mountains which, if not on the grandest scale, are, perhaps, the fairest average specimens of its mountains that can be met with. They have no pretence to compare with those portions of the Alps which belong to Germany, but they are about as lofty as most other of the German hills; are more varied in their aspect; are full of tradition; of evidences of past history and commotions; and, as a vine-land, you shall find nothing so extensive, so perfect, or so picturesque in any other quarter of the nation. Spite of all that has been written about the Rhine, from the glowing poetry of Childe Harold, which still remains the most descriptive, and most answering in the felicitous truth of its epithets to one's own feelings, down through the journals of hosts of travellers, to Fennimore Cooper's elaborate comparison of it with his native Hudson, in his Heidenmauer, it is much to say, that though many visitors are somewhat disappointed on first approaching the Rhinegau near Bonn, yet there are few who are not thoroughly enraptured with the full course of this scenery from the Seven Mountains to Bingen, and the more so, if they remain a few days on its banks, penetrate into its hidden valleys, or if they view it a second time. The great want about it is that of full-grown and noble wood; but this is a great, common, and growing want in Germany, where wood is the almost only fuel with which forty millions of people have to cook the year round, and to warm themselves through their long and severe winter. But the loftiness and varying wildness of its hills; its sky-seeking pinnacles of crag, on which are often perched the most picturesque of ruined, or yet habitable castles; its black precipices; its splintered and naked gigantic piles of rocks; its miles and scores of miles of hanging vineyards, all in the neatest order of cultivation, and supported with terraces and walls on rocky and steep eminences, which bear testimony to the most incessant labour of ages; its wood-crowned summits; its delicious valleys opening right and left as you proceed; its green fields and gardens, full of happy-looking peasantry, on its river banks; its fine old ruins of castles and convents on the mountain heights; and towns, and towers, and villages strewn along its shores for scores and hundreds of miles, so quaint, so old-fashioned, so dimmed and darkened with the hues of antiquity, and yet so full of life and population;-it is impossible to witness all this without the deepest delight and enthusiasm; and, when you have seen many other and very glorious rivers, you shall still acknowledge that this is a true region of poetry and beauty. The river itself is a most noble and glorious river. The Thames, from London to the sea, and upwards to Richmond, is the grandest spectacle of the kind which the world ever has had or has yet to shew. The mighty and most wealthy and populous city on its banks, with all its world-influences, and its irrepressible activity; its masses of ships lying for miles on its surface, or coming in from, and going out to every region of the earth; the life, the stir, the flying steamers, the sounds of business and cries of mariners-it is no wonder that it fills all foreigners with inexpres |