Having rested under the shadow of our friendly grove sufficiently long to permit my making a rough sketch of the valley beneath us, we resumed our march, and rounding the hill, opened out a new prospect, scarcely inferior in point of beauty, though widely different in kind, from that which had passed from our gaze. We looked down upon a sort of basin, fertile, and cultivated to the minutest corner, round which, like sentinels on duty, were gathered a succession of mountains, covered to their peaks with foliage. The dark hue of the fir was here beautifully intermixed with the fresher green of the birch and hazel; while occasionally, an enormous rock raised his bald front over all, more after the fashion of a huge ruin, the monument of man's vanity, than of a fabric of nature's creation. But the circumstance which more than all others surprised us, was the density of the population. Of large towns there seem to be, in Bohemia, very few; but every vale and strath is crowded with human dwellings, village succeeding village, and hamlet treading on hamlet, with the most remarkable fecundity. On the other hand, you may strain your eyes in vain in search of those species of habitations which give to our English landscapes their peculiar charm. There is no such thing in all Bohemia,--I question whether there be in all Germany,--as a park; and as to detached farm-houses, they are totally unknown. The nobility inhabit what they term schlosses, that is to say, castles or palaces, which are invariably planted down, either in the very heart of a town or large village, or at most, a gunshot removed from it. No sweeping meadows surround them with their tasteful swells, their umbrageous covers and lordly avenues; no deer troop from glade to glade, or cluster in groups round the stem of some giant oak, their favourite haunt for ages. But up to the very hall-door, or at least to the foundations of the wall, which girdles in the court-yard, perhaps twelve or twenty feet wide, the plough regularly passes. A garden, the graff generally possesses, and his taste in flowers is good; but it almost always happens that his very garden affords no privacy, and that his flowers are huddled together within some narrow space, perhaps in the very court-yard of which I have already spoken as alone dividing his mansion from the open and cultivated fields.