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DOMESTIC MANNEES OF THE PEUSSIANS.

that slopes at its back contracting finely with the pale coraltint of its windowless and roofless walls, bastioned at intervalswith tlieir high, battered towers; and with the dark cumulusclouds of the surrounding trees rising in dense and solidfumes, as it were, about its lofty sicfes, and the little many-arched bridge spanning the fretting stream at its base; andwith the monster earth-billows that make up the mountain-chainof the Oden-Wald swelling up, like immense volcanic " land-bubbles," along the opposite shore, and the bright tints ofthe sunshine, as it falls in a golden flood upon their vine-cladsides, staining the river like a rieh oriel window; and thedistant Neckar, seen at the far end of the narrow mountainvista, thin almost as the trickling of a spring, shining downamid the darkness of the chasm in silver flashes, like a glow-worm at the bottom of some steep bank;—all these adjunetsconspire to render the Castle of Heidelberg at once thegrandest and the most beautiful ruin, perhaps, in the world— the Alhambra, as it has been termed, of Germany, thoughthe old Moorish pile sinks to the elaborateness of filagreebeside it: the one being pretty and light as a Cluster of iciclessparkling in the sun, the other sublime and massive as aniceberg towering out of the sea.

Such is the exterior of Heidelberg; still, the interior isinfinitely more graceful. " Here art," says Goethe, " borrowsbeauty from nature, and nature returns it with interest;"for the charms of Ornament and the architectural delicacies,that are utterly lost in the grandeur of the mass viewedfrom a distance, positively enrapture the eye, when near, withthe very luxury of decoration; while the pleasing incongruitiesof the ruin seize upon the mind with all the force of contrast:the moats changed to a wilderness, with their tangle ofbrambles and trees—the ramparts bristling with wild firs