s, looked like a real Paradise. The
long ridges over which we travelled extend for nearly a hundred and
fifty miles--from the Elbe almost to the Danube. The soil is not
fertile, the inhabitants are exceedingly poor, and from our own
experience, the climate must be unhealthy. In winter the country is
exposed to the full sweep of the northern winds, and in summer the sun
shines down on it with unbroken force. There are few streams running
through it, and the highest part, which divides the waters of the Baltic
from those of the Black Sea is filled for a long distance with marshes
and standing pools, whose exhalations must inevitably subject the
inhabitants to disease. This was perceptible in their sallow, sickly
countenances; many of the women are afflicted with the _goitre_, or
swelling of the throat; I noticed that towards evening they always
carefully muffled up their faces. According to their own statements, the
people suffer much from the cold in winter, as the few forests the
country affords are in possession of the noblemen to whom the land
belongs, and they are not willing to let them be cut down. The dominions
of these petty despots are marked along the road with as much precision
as the boundaries of an empire; we saw sometimes their stalely castles
at a distance, forming quite a contrast to the poor scattering villages
of the peasants.

At Kollin, the road, which had been running eastward in the direction of
Olmutz, turned to the south, and we took leave of the Elbe, after
tracing back his course from Magdeburg nearly to his home in the
mountains of Silesia. The country was barren and monotonous, but a
bright sunshine made it look somewhat cheerful. We passed, every few
paces, some shrine or statue by the roadside. This had struck me,
immediately on crossing the border, in the Saxon Switzerland--it seemed
as if the boundary of Saxony was that of Protestantism. But here in the
heart of Bohemia, the extent to which this image worship is carried,
exceeds anything I had imagined. There is something pleasing as well as
poetical in the idea of a shrine by the wayside, where the weary
traveller can rest, and raise his heart in thankfulness to the Power
that protects him; it was no doubt a pious spirit that placed them
there; but the people appear to pay the reverence to the picture which
they should give to its spiritual image, and the pictures themselves are
so shocking and ghastly, they seem better calculated to exc