_August 4th._--_Lenzburg_.... At six o'clock we caught a glimpse of the castle walls glittering in sunshine, a hopeful sign, and we set forward through the fog. The ruin stands at the brink of a more than perpendicular, an overhanging rock, on the top of a green hill, which rises abruptly from the town. The steepest parts are ascended by hundreds of stone steps, worn by age, often broken, and half-buried in turf and flowers. These steps brought us to a terrace bordered by neatly-trimmed vines; and we found ourselves suddenly in broad sunshine under the castle walls, elevated above an ocean of vapour, which was bounded on one side by the clear line of the Jura Mountains, and out of which rose at a distance what seemed an island, crested by another castle. We then ascended the loftiest of the towers, and the spectacle all around was magnificent, visionary--I was going to say endless, but on one side was the substantial barrier of the Jura. By degrees (the vapours settling or shifting) other castles were seen on island eminences; and the tops of bare or woody hills taking the same island form; while trees, resembling ships, appeared and disappeared, and rainbow lights (scarcely more visionary than the mimic islands) passed over, or for a moment rested on the breaking mists. On the other side the objects were more slowly developed. We looked long before we could distinguish the far-distant Alps, but by degrees discovered them, shining like silver among masses of clouds. The intervening wide space was a sea of vapour, but we stayed on the eminence till the sun had mastery of all beneath us, after a silent process of change and interchange--of concealing and revealing. I hope we were not ungrateful to the memory of past times when (standing on the summit of Helvellyn, Scaw Fell, Fairfield, or Skiddaw) we have felt as if the world itself could not present a more sublime spectacle....