That, like their lords, together there
Sink slowly to decay.[10]
MORAL.
The darker features of this drama are every day seen on the stage of life. Lovers’ vows plighted, soon to be broken—man’s promises of eternal love cancelled—women’s hopes and happiness blighted—but perfidy sooner or later punished.
It was enough for Sternfels to bring home a mistress from Palestine, without parading his guilty partner before the eyes of his betrothed and insulted Louisa. Yet this, and worse, we every day witness! Sternfels’ punishment was not light. The ingratitude of his mistress, and a life of solitude and remorse, were severe chastisements!
Winding along from the ruins last-mentioned, we come to a very striking object, a little short of St. Goar, which attracts the attention of all passengers. It is a dismantled fortification, still black with the powder by which it was blown up in the French revolution. The Rheinfels was long a robber-fortress of the first water, and its tyrant chiefs carried their depredations and extortions to such a height as to league all the adjacent provinces against them. The chiefs held out and defied the country; but at length the strong-hold fell—and, with it, the whole of the brigand castles on both sides of the Rhine.
LURLEY, OR THE ECHO.
(Legend the Sixth.)
Almost immediately after passing the ruins of the Rheinfels, we enter a narrow and sombre river gorge, where the stream is impetuous, turbulent, and tortuous; the cliffs of dark basalt rising almost perpendicular, but in rugged strata or layers, inclining in all directions from the horizontal to nearly the vertical. Here the Rhine like its sister the Rhone—
——“Cleaves its way between