The beautiful river becomes more impressively beautiful as it passes on here through some of the most remarkable of its tortuous windings, which continue from a little beyond Marsbach to Aschach. This, the Schlägen, is indeed generally acknowledged to afford the grandest series of varied views between Passau and Linz. Before the river takes its first abrupt turn round the precipitous mountain on the left, the ruin on the summit of that mountain stands sentinel as it were over the entrance to the serpentine defile. This is the remains of another robber-knight’s stronghold, known as Haichenbach to which the vague tradition attaches of an owner in the thirteenth century who, having slain his brother, retired here to end his days in solitude relieved only by the presence of his daughter. The castle was reduced to its present state by the Emperor Maximilian the First. A little way beyond, and the Danube whirls and swirls round the long jutting mountain on which the ruin stands, and so far “doubles in its tracks” that soon Haichenbach again comes in sight. The Schlägen, with its ever-rushing flood of water, its rocky sides now precipitous, now broken and pinnacled, now bare and craggy, now grown with fir and other trees, offers a succession of impressive scenes before which “the grandest views upon the Rhine sink into insignificance.” Planché, taking a passage from Burke’s famous essay, suggests that where the Rhine stands for the beautiful the Danube represents the sublime. As one knowing little more of the Rhine than can be seen from the railway, I am scarcely qualified to make any comparison; but I should wish to amend Planché’s finding so as to credit the Danube with beauty as well as sublimity, for it assuredly has both. “From Mayence to Cologne there is scarcely one mile of uninterrupted wild scenery; and even if there were, the charm would be broken by some pert galley, with its white awning and gaudy flag, some lumbering Dutch beurtschiff, or, worse than all, the monstrous anachronism of a steamboat, splashing, spluttering and fuming along at the rate of twelve miles an hour.[7] The mouldering towers that totter upon the crags of the Danube, on the contrary, are surrounded by scenery rude as the times in which they were reared, and savage as the warriors who dwelt in them. Nothing seems changed but themselves. The solitary boat that now and then glides by them, is of the same fashion as that on which their marauding masters sallied down, perhaps three hundred years ago. The humble cottages that here and there peep through the eternal firs, and the church that rears its dusky spire upon some neighbouring hill, are of the same age. The costume of the poor straggling fishermen and woodcutters around them is scarcely altered; and, indeed, one cannot look upon their own walls, blackened by fire and crumbling in the blast, without conjuring up the form of their ancient lord newly returned from Palestine, and finding his mountain-fastness burnt