Along the shores of the broad Moldau, and climbing, as it were, the steep hills which girdle it in, Prague lies at your feet. The river, flowing on with a clear and gentle current, seems to have cut it in twain. Yet are the characters of these divisions more completely in unison than in almost any other instance of a city so dealt with which I remember to have seen. A thousand towers, spires, minarets, and domes, shed over the whole an air of magnificence which in some sort partakes of the oriental. There are hanging-gardens, too, and a noble bridge; there are large and exquisitely wooded islands in the Moldau; there is the Alt Stadt on the further bank, with its Thein Kirche, or Tyne Church, celebrated in story, and its venerable Town Hall; there is the Kleinseite nearer at hand, where streets and squares, crowded with the residences of the nobles, rise one above another, till they terminate in the Old Palace, and the unfinished cathedral of St. Vitus; there is the Neu Stadt, the handiwork of the Emperor Charles IV., covering a prodigious extent of ground, and enriched with the convents, hospitals, and other public buildings, which owe their existence to the liberality of the Jesuits. There are these, with a background of low, yet picturesque hills, surmounted here and there by some blackened ruin, or other monument of times gone by, which make up altogether one of the most striking inland panoramas on which I have any where had the good fortune to gaze. We stopped our carriage some minutes in order to enjoy it; and then pushed forward. At every step which we took in advance, objects of a varying but not a lessened interest, met us. Now we passed a monastery, an extensive pile, but evidently of modern construction; now a convent of English nuns was pointed out to us. By-and-by the road sank down into a sort of ravine, which shut out all view except of the fortifications that enclose the city, and block up the extremity of the defile. Then began signs of active and busy life to accumulate round us. Countrymen, with their wains, were met or overtaken; bodies of cavalry, in their stable dresses, were exercising their horses on the level; here and there an officer in uniform rode past us; and carriages, in which sat some of Bohemia's fairest and noblest daughters, swept by. Next came the barrier, the demand for passports, the drawbridge, over which our wheels rolled heavily; the exercising ground for the artillery, where a strong brigade of guns was manoeuvring; a momentary glimpse of the convent of St. Lawrence, and the old towers of the oldest portion of the palace; after which we saw nothing distinctly, till our journey, properly so called, had terminated. For our course lay down a very steep street, and across the bridge into the Alt Stadt, where at a hotel, rich in all the essentials of food, and wine, and couches, though somewhat deficient in the superfluity of cleanliness, we established our head-quarters for a season.