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The Upper Rhine : Mayence to the Lake of Constance
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188

DOMESTIC MANNEBS OF THE PEUSSIANS.

tlirough the red-stone lace-work, as it were, of the FreiburgDom-kirche.

We saw this same Freiburg Dom by moonlight, and agrander, and yet prettier sight, never charmed the senses.

It was one of those autumn evenings, when tlie clearnessof the sky smacks of the Coming winter. The cold blue-greyvault of the firmament was literally cloudless, and sparklcdso intenscly with the dense crowd of constellations, that theheavens seemed to be positively frosted over with whatastronomers call " star-dust;" while the broad phosphorcscentband of the Milky Way glittered with its millions of worlds asthickly as the sea by night with its countless animalcules.

The moon was newly risen, and hung like a bright silvershield just above the mountain chain, that, wrapped in a deepblack mist of shade, appeared like monster masses of blackmarble, while the beams slanted down from behind theirsummits and feil upon the earth white as hoar-frost, so thatthe house-tops and street-fountains appeared to be half coveredwith snow.

To see the Münster spire at such a time intercepting therays, and the bright white light pouring through its stonemeshes in broad luminous beams, was a sight never to beforgotten; for the finely-varied devices of the lattice-workshone out in all the deep contrast of light and shade, thepierced embroidery of the steeple seeming to be picked outwith silver—here revealing some handsome trefoil design,there displaying the petal-shaped tracery of a Gothic window,and there the web-like mullions of a " rosace."

Then, as the moon tipped the fretted rafters, as it were, ofthe spire with the chaste lustre of its rays, and lighted up theedges of the ornamented gables and pinnacles to the octagonalturret, the edifice seemed to bristle with a thousand icicles, as