Let any one sail along the coast for a few miles at the Giant's Causeway, enter some of the deep and echoing caverns, overhung by the basaltic mass, and see the columns rising tier above tier, sometimes four hundred feet in height, and assuming every wild and fantastic shape; or let him walk over the acres of columns, whose tops are as perfectly polygonal and as accurately fitted to one another as the most skilful architect could make them, and he will confess how superior Nature is, when she would present a model for human imitation; and how with accurate system she can combine the wildest disorder, and thus delight by symmetry, while she awes by sublimity. Let us next pass over to continental Europe. We have reached the Rhine at Bonn, and the steamboat takes us at once into the midst of the romantic Drachenfels, or seven mountains, the result of volcanic agency, and still presenting more or less of the conical outline peculiar almost to modern volcanoes. These are the commencement of the romantic scenery of the Rhine. From thence to Bingen, some sixty or seventy miles, that river has cut its way through hills and mountains, sometimes rising one thousand feet. Along their base, the inhabitants have planted many a well-known town, while old castles, half crumbled down, recall continually the history of feudal ages; and here, too, springs up a multitude of remembrances of startling events in more recent times. The mind, indeed, finds itself drawn at one moment to some historical monument, and the next to scenery of surpassing beauty or sublimity; now the bold, overhanging rock, now the deep recess, now the towering mountain, now the quiet dell with its romantic villages; while every where on the north bank, the vine-clad terraces show us what wonders human industry can accomplish. Nor does the Rhine lose its interest when we have emerged from its _Ghor_ into its more open valley, from Bingen to Basle, in Switzerland. On its right bank, the Vosges Mountains, and on its left, the Black Forest, with not infrequent volcanic summits, afford a fine resting-place for the eye, as the rail car bears us rapidly over the rich intervening level. Or if we turn aside,--as to Heidelberg, on the Neckar,--what can be a more splendid sight than to stand by the old castle above the town, and look down the valley as the sun is sinking in the west! But after all, it is in Switzerland, and there only, that we meet with the climax of scenographical wonders. Nowhere else can we find such lakes in the midst of such mountains; such pleasant valleys bordered by such stupendous hills; such gorges, and precipices, and passes, and especially such glaciers; such avalanches, such snow-capped mountains, while vegetation at their base, and far up their sides, is fresh and luxuriant.