HEIDELBERG.

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HEIDELBERG.

Heidelberg is the Rheinfels of the Neckar. It is the siteof an ancient " Scldoss-Festung," as the Germans call it, orPalace-fortress as we shoulcl say in English.

But grandly as the Rhine-ruin is set amid the brown andprecipitous cliffs of St. Goar, with the great Grerman rivervvalled in by the lmge pyramids of the rocky masses, thatblacken the water alongside them with their shadows, tilithe stream has almost the aspect of a pool or crater-lake;and with the yellow and roofless fa9ade of the totteringstronghold cresting its green truncated mountain-cone closebeside the stream—the sky shining in bright blue patchesthrough the jagged window-holes and empty embrasures, andthe walls standing in fragmentary plates almost like the tallisolated stones of some old Druid temple,—grandly as thisrock-girt pile strikes the mind, and vast as its proportionsappear in the desolateness of the abandoned citadel, never-theless it dwindles into the ugliness of a mere monster dungeonwhen compared with the still-perfect architectural graces andrieh red colour tinting the ivy-curtained walls of the eightpalaces that make up the mountain-castle of Heidelberg.

The Neckar ruin, indeed, is set sublimely on a shelf ofrock, half-way up one of the lmge mountains between whichthe meandering river pushes its way, and with a pedestalof cannonless ramparts descending in steps almost to thewater-side ; and with the long, single street of a town thatStretches at its feet, filmed over with the smoke steamingup from below, and the green sward of the mountain mass