THE CITY OF CONSTANZ.

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told of this Dom-Stadt as of all the other Romish Cathedral-towns bordering the Rinne.

The great river begins its ecclesiastical tale at Köln (a talefüll of vain attempts to struggle against the Christian Revolu-tion, and to revive the priestly glories of past times), and endsits wretched history at Constanz. The mason's chisel, chip-ping away at new towers or fresh choirs, rings in the ear,as we have said, at every ancient basilic city that we visitalong the Rinne shores; and here, as usual, the same inipotentwork goes on. The civic chronicles, too, speak only of alike decay in the commerce and industry of the place, tellinghow the town at one time mimbered some 40,000 souls withinits walls, and how, at the present hour, it can boast but littlemore than one-eighth of its former population; while thestreets themselves, that are now deserted almost as a cityof the plague, form a melancholy contrast with the accountsof its ancient trade, and with even the horde of beggarsthat formerly swarmed about its colony of convents.

Indeed, the chief town of the Boden-See (as the Germansstyle the Lake of Constanz) is but a mere civic wreck—acapital that no more belongs to the present time than do theexhumed ruins of Pompeii. Its silent and idle thoroughfareswould lead one to believe that it was the sleeping city ofromance, the people themselves seeming to be hardly yetwide-awake, or fairly roused out of their mediasval slumber.The very sight of its antiquated chandler-like shops gives theplace a half-fossil look, as if it were some Megatherium Haupt-stadt that had justbeen dug out of antediluvian deposits, whilethe natives have the same lively air as if they had been forcenturies immured, like toads, in rocks.

Many of the buildings of Constanz, we are told, reirainunaltered since the fifteenth Century; but these, unlike the