_latter_ against the _former_ any Summer’s night of the year! THE BASTEI. We left Kœnigstein early on a beautiful morning in our gondola, and in two hours we were housed in New Raden, at the foot of the BASTEI. Having procured a guide, we commenced a laborious and steep zig-zag ascent towards the summit of the arch-lion of Saxon Switzerland. It required an hour or nearly so, to accomplish this task—each tourniquet of the ascent opening out more and more extended and splendid prospects. At length we got into the “regio petrea,” or stony region—sometimes winding round the bases of huge cliffs—sometimes squeezing through narrow fissures of the rock—and at others, crossing profound chasms over slender wooden bridges, or rather foot-paths. When almost despairing of gaining the summit before our strength was exhausted, we suddenly found ourselves on a small but level platform, on the highest pinnacle of the Bastei, and commanding a complete view, not only of the immense mass of splintered rocks around us, but of the whole country in every direction. In all my peregrinations round this globe, I never met with any locality or prospect similar to the one which burst on my astonished sight at this place! I’ve travers’d many a mountain strand, Abroad and in my native land;— And it has been my fate to tread, Where safety more than pleasure led— But by my Halidome— A scene so rude, so wild as this— Or so sublime in barrenness, Ne’er did my wandering footsteps press, Where’er I chanc’d to roam! We stood on the verge of a tremendous precipice, eight hundred feet in height, and overhanging the Elbe below. Though its brow is fringed with an iron ballustrade, I observed that very few ventured to look over the frightful bourne, “Lest the brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong.” In the opposite direction, rises one of the most singular scenes that ever opened on the human eye. The billows of an angry ocean suddenly converted into stone, while agitated by a furious hurricane, might convey some, but a very imperfect, idea of this astonishing locality. The fractured rocks, though all presenting the stratifications so often mentioned, and most of them still horizontal, assume almost every shape and form that imagination bodies forth in the autumnal clouds that range themselves along the western horizon, as the cortege of a setting sun, on a beautiful evening. Pyramids, cliffs, spires, columns, ruins, cupolas, turrets, battlements, castles, colossal statues and fantastic figures—of everything, in short, which a fertile fancy can conjure up in the animate or inanimate world.[86]