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162

THE " SEYEN MOUNTAINS.

the mind a long train of thoughts and feelings; so tliat you getalmost to love, " like old familiär faces," the very Stocks andstones by the way, through the wondrous magic of association;in the same manner as some fond mother, in the depth ofher affection, finds a melancholy beauty even in the brokentoys of her dcparted little one.

So it is with the Drachenfels. That handsome huge lumpof volcanic porphyry—with its edges next the river exqui-sitely jagged and broken, and the lines about them runninga thousand different ways, and its peaks of rock beside thesummit, standing up like monster tusks—it is not a mere massof stone, but instinct with life from the stränge middle-agemyth that is wrapt about it.

True the tale is, as it were, out of tune with the realcharacter of the present age; nevertheless, it mirrors the child-like faith and bloody barbarism of the past times, as brightlyas if the modern magicians of the East had conjured theevents up to the vision of some youth, and you had heard theboy at your side telling all ho saw.*

But what is better still, it expresses the very sentiment ofthe spot; for though we are all sufficiently scientific in thepresent Century to put little or no trust in gobiin stories andtales of hybrid monsters, still, in the thick dusk and solitudeof the wooded dingles hereabouts, your eye, despite yourreason, will twist the vague, indefinite forms of the Stocks andstones, into curious griffin shapes and spectral figures; so that,if you know now-a-days that these are mere optical illusions,begotten by the emotions of the time and place—(for it is im-possible, if you have any soul at all, to thread your way

* See Mr. Lane's account of the mirror of Ink, in whieh a lad whoaccompanied him to the magician was made to see and descrihe the figures ofNelson, and—we think—Shakespeare, though the lad was a native of Egypt,and had never, probably, heard of either.