O’er sea and land the guilty flies,
To blunt the stings of conscience keen;
Vain hope! That “worm that never dies,”
Preys on his vitals all unseen!
The mice were meant to represent the conscience of the cruel bishop, from which, neither the streams of the Rhine nor the battlements of the tower could protect him.
CHANGE OF SCENE.
After passing Bingen, the poetry of the Rhine disappears—or sinks into smooth but unimpassioned prose. The “castled crags” and precipitous cliffs soften down into sloping glades and country villas—the river widens, and becomes studded with innumerable islets, verdant to the water’s edge—the majestic and romantic features of the scenery are changed into the beautiful and the fertile—it is like turning from the statues of Mars and Bellona to those of Cupid and Psyche! The legends and tales vanish with the rocks and ruins where they had a “local habitation”—romance degenerates into reality—the fervid imagination is softened down into sober judgment—and the excitement of admiration subsides into the tranquillity of reflection! The eye is spoiled for the charms of the wide-spread Rhinegau, teeming with the grape, and with every necessary of life; yet the landscape is loveliness itself. What it has lost in sublimity, it has fully gained in beauty.
The sun had just set beneath the horizon, and while—
“Twilight’s soft shades stole o’er the village green,