in amusing costumes, of mountain heights and solemn woods. Now you are standing before the finest paintings and statuary, ancient and modern, quaint and noble; now you are rapt in the music, and the scenic fairyland, of theatric and operatic art; the hum, and stir, and warmth of city life is around you,—and again you are buried in deep forests, or seated in some elfin glen, the green clear water rushing and murmuring below, and the tall pines and splintered crags of near and of distant heights soaring high above you; or are half-standing, half-seated on some stone on the mountain side, gazing over a far and sun-bright landscape, with its hundred smoking towns, and its hill-tops glittering in the blaze of noon, amid the blue and hazy distance. The world lies stretched in vastness before you or below at your feet, like a beautiful dream; and yet after you pass away from it, and winter closes upon your home, you shall find that this sunny dream does not fade, but that you have laid up a life-long store of rich remembrances; have widened the field of your vision; and spread around, regions of beauty through all the space of your inward world, that neither winter can reach, nor night darken, nor time snatch again from your knowledge and enjoyment.

AFTER all, the most picturesque portion of the out-of-door life of the Germans consists in those processions and usages which belong to the Catholic church. In the Catholic parts of Germany these still remain in their full glory; and in the other parts, where the Reformed religion has asserted a co-partnership in the public mind in those fragments of such usages as still survive, and must survive in a populace; a great mass of which, frequently one half, frequently more, still are of the old faith. In the Catholic districts, carnival is still celebrated as in Italy, during the three days in February ending with Ash-Wednesday, though not with the same native gusto and spirit as amongst the Italians. The next approach to this is in Catholic Cologne, and in Mayence, with which Mannheim, Worms, and other Rhine cities, have sometimes attempted to vie. In Cologne in particular the people give themselves up to it heart and soul. They have their public processions, generally intended to satirize some public or private occurrence of the day, or to amuse the people with grotesque representations of historic scenes and personages. Others, again, are got up to recal the romantic ages in all their splendour. In 1841, Mannheim got up a pro

cession of this kind, intended to rival the most magnificent ones of Cologne. It was the entrance of a Princess of England as the imperial bride, the Emperor of Germany and a great number of princes being assembled to receive her. There were electors, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, bishops and knights, in great numbers; all on horseback, in the most gorgeous chivalric costume and array. There was the travelling kitchen, the travelling apothecary with his shop, belonging to the imperial train. There

was old Father Rhine, Michael Scott the necromancer, Saracens, and heaven knows what. All was conceived and executed with the most correct historic or poetic propriety, and formed a most splendid spectacle as it paraded the streets. Those, however, who were accustomed to the carnival of Italy, or even of Cologne, complained that it was too silent and pantomimic. That it wanted all the attractions of masking figures, and witty encounters in the streets. These are to be found in Cologne.

Here, immediately after New-Year's day, committees are formed, who make it their business to strike out and prepare costumes, characters, witticisms, etc. in readiness for the Carnival, or Fasching as it is called in Germany. The Fasching committees meet in general assembly once a week, in a hall fitted up for the purpose with raised platforms and rostra for orators. This is called the great council, and is presided over by a select council and a president. Here, in sittings of from two to three hours in length, they appear in hundreds in their costumes and in many-coloured caps. Here are proposed such plans as have been laid before the different. committees; and orators, generally clad in old Roman costume, address them from the rostra in advocacy or rejection of these proposals. Then commence warm and often humorous debates, and resolutions are adopted amid the loudest outcries and clamours of applause or disapproval, attended with the playing of flourishes and marches by a numerous orchestra.

These assemblies, as the carnival approaches, are held still oftener. They are opened with the general singing of some patriotic song, and the three days of the public carnival make but a small portion of the real one, which is going on almost daily before the arrival of the public exhibition. This year the last General Assembly was held on the Sunday evening, and was remarkable for the

number of distinguished persons that were present, amongst whom were two princes of the royal house of Prussia, and many high officers of the province; and the president lamented, in name of the select council, that the British parliament had not, out of brotherly regard, so arranged its own opening as to have allowed their beloved monarch also to be present on his return home.

A writer in the daily papers describing this, luxuriates in his reminiscences of the inexhaustible humours of Cologne, which, he says, fling forth a whole deluge of faschings literature, countless new songs, new speeches, new drolleries and squibs, comedies and allegories; hundreds of private representations of portions of the great show and processions, and others in connexion with it, and lively descriptions of these in prose and verse. In fact, during this period, all the world, both in Cologne and in other Rhine towns, is carnival mad. carnival mad. Every man turns author, poet, satirist, actor, mimic, mock-hero, and what not. Everybody is writing and printing songs, speeches, dramatic sketches, comic and serious; musical compositions, farces, squibs, fly about in all directions, thick as the falling leaves of autumn.

The great points of splendour in the carnival are the procession and the mask-ball. The latter, at Cologne, being held in the great gothic hall of the Kauffhaus, highly adorned for the occasion. This the twofold train of the procession represented in part year the Olympic Games, the rest a procession from the mythologic underworld, mixed with characters from the Inferno of Dante. The infernal train burst forth to the day in the Neumarkte, suggested by an interesting elopement story. The god of all jolly fellows led the train in his chariot of victory, his rescued bride Phantasia, sitting near him. Dante, his adjutant, rode by the side of the chariot; while Klünzel, an entirely modern allegorical figure, was dragged reluctantly behind the chariot, lashed by the Furies. Then came the dethroned Pluto and Proserpina, with their threeheaded dog Cerberus. Besides all the mythologic and legendary figures, Mars, Venus, Charon, Faust, Don Juan, Mephistopheles, etc., were numbers of parodies and caricatures; amongst them a Dutchman, who, in punishment of his sins against his German grandmother, was condemned to eat lump-sugar for his daily food; while over his head, as a sword of Damocles, hung a monstrous

beet-root, labelled "lumps by the entrance ten dollars;" alluding, no doubt, to attempts of the Dutch to levy heavy import duties on sugar by the Rhine, and intimating by the great beet-root, that this might be carried too far; and the Germans having to depend on the beet-root for all their sugar, as they now do for much, the Dutch would thus bring the beet-root on their own heads. The word lump too, which means not only a lump in German, but also a rag, and ragamuffin, as well as the word Eingang, meaning import as well as entrance, no doubt presented many witty ideas to the spectators. In fact, there are to Germans a whole host of puns and allusions connected with this allegory that are lost to foreigners.

Sysiphus came next, with his enormous stone, and offered to teach the people of Mayence the mode of rolling it, while they, on their part, regretted that they could not have the pleasure of using it as they would.-An allusion to the fierce contest, which in the former winter had been going on between the Mayence people and they of Biberich, who are very jealous of one another; the Biberich people wishing to draw from Mayence part of its Rhine navigation, in consequence of which the Mayence people in one night had conveyed three hundred boat-loads of stones, and dropping them into the water before Biberich, had thus cut off its harbour, but had been compelled by the German Confederation to fish them all up again. Next came a censor of the press, very busy in making waste paper, in allusion to the new Prussian censorship, from which so much had been expected, and which proved a mere piece of political hocus-pocus. Another figure was labelled Dante's Divina Commedia, a similar allusion to restrictions on the introduction of religious matters into comedy.

These, and other such things; shew the nature of the Cologne carnival. It is a sort of Saturnalia, in which the people take the opportunity to give a loose to their pent-up feelings on political subjects; and where they dare not venture in sober earnest to attack the acts of government, to make it obvious by the means of carnival license and ridicule, that they are neither unnoticed nor approved. More local and private matters also burst out in satirical shapes and sallies; and Hans Wurst, the jack-pudding of Germany, plays off his fooleries, and foolscaps and bells abound at all corners.

Everywhere, amongst Protestants as well as Catholics, all over