_July 4th._--Madame de Porbeck, who is gay, good-natured, and agreeable, proposed to me to go to Eberstein Castle, one of the most celebrated excursions from hence, which I gladly accepted, and we went after dinner. I have no talent for description of scenery, and, if I had, it would be superfluous, to describe these noted spots. Suffice to say that I never was so enchanted in my life as with this Castle and the panorama it commands. I cannot figure to myself anything more lovely, and it wants nothing to make it perfect. There is a mixture of everything that can interest, astonish, and delight; the magnificent pine forests, feathering up the sides of the mountains; the vast chaos of hills cast into every variety of form; the river winding, rushing, sparkling, and murmuring in its course; the innumerable villages with which the banks are studded; the patches of cultivation striping the hill-sides, so curiously subdivided, diversified between corn-fields, potatoes, and vineyards, looking so minute in the vast space; the bridges; the curling smoke; the moving objects, like Lilliputians, in the distance; the sounds and the smells wafted by the air--altogether make a combination which affords inexpressible pleasure. Above all, I must not forget the lights and shadows, and the glorious effects of the setting sun in the calm and clear evening. The afternoon is the time for visiting such spots as these, when the noonday heats are past, and the blaze of the sun is softened and harmonised into a milder but a clearer light; and as the shadows lengthen and produce constant variety of shape, and draw fresh outlines on the opposite hills and in the valleys, and colours bright and changing like those of a rainbow dye the whole horizon, lighting up the course of the Rhine, and painting with purple hues the mountains of the Vosges, I looked and thought that nothing on earth could surpass this in beauty, and I thanked God for the faculty of enjoying it so much as I do. We went over the Castle, from which the views are charming. It is perched like an eagle's nest on the top of a conical hill; it was once a fortress of a feudal lord, and is now a small hunting-lodge, the new part curiously grafted on the old, and the interior prettily and comfortably arranged, but with hardly any accommodation. The Grand Duke comes here sometimes for a little while to shoot in the forest. The road up to it is like the Simplon, and has been recently made by the town. As we descended, we overtook some of the huge pines, which looked as if they were hewn 'to be the mast of some great ammiral.' They are put upon wheels at a great distance from each other, and drawn by oxen, and the way in which they contrive to get them round the turnings is really wonderful. We came on one at the turn, and it so completely barred the way, and seemed itself at such _a fix_, that I thought no one would have been able to pass; but by shifting,