le into snake-figure, and with increased
velocity, but silent mostly, and trim to the edge, a fine flint-colored
river;--though in aeons long anterior, it must have been a very
different matter for torrents and water-power. The Country is one huge
Block of Sandstone, so many square miles of that material; ribbed,
channelled, torn and quarried, in this manner, by the ever-busy
elements, for a million of Ages past! Chiefly by the Elbe himself, since
he got to be a River, and became cosmic and personal; ceasing to be a
mere watery chaos of Lakes and Deluges hereabouts. For the Sandstone was
of various degrees of hardness; tenacious as marble some parts of
it, soft almost as sand other parts. And the primordial diluviums and
world-old torrents, great and small, rushing down from the Bohemian
Highlands, from the Saxon Metal Mountains, with such storming, gurgling
and swashing, have swept away the soft parts, and left the hard standing
in this chaotic manner, and bequeathed it all to the Elbe, and the
common frosts and rains of these human ages.

"Elbe has now a trim course; but Elbe too is busy quarrying and mining,
where not artificially held in;--and you notice at every outlet of a
Brook from the interior, north side and south side, how busy the Brook
has been. Boring, grinding, undermining; much helped by the frosts, by
the rains. AEons ago, the Brook was a lake, in the interior; but was
every moment laboring to get out; till it has cut for itself that
mountain gullet, or sheer-down chasm, and brought out with it an
Alluvium or Delta,--on which, since Adam's time, human creatures have
built a Hamlet. That is the origin, or unwritten history, of most
hamlets and cultivated spots you fall in with here: they are the waste
shavings of the Brook, working millions of years, for its own object
of getting into the Elbe in level circumstances. Ploughed fields, not
without fertility, are in the interior, if you ascend that Brook; the
Hamlet, at the delta or mouth of it, is as if built upon its TONGUE
and into its GULLET: think how picturesque, in the November rains, for
example!

"The road" one road, "from Dresden to Aussig, to Lobositz, Budin, Prag,
runs up the river-brink (south brink); or, in our day, as Prag-Dresden
Railway, thunders through those solitudes; strangely awakening their
echoes; and inviting even the bewildered Tourist to reflect, if he
could. The bewildered Tourist sees rock-walls heaven-high on both hands
of hi