with which she had shaded her face, and | and hell!" shouted forth the impassioned repaid her husband with a gentle smile. lecturer. The gentle Griselda roused a My reading has much benefited you?" little-a very little, and perceiving the billet "Yes-most surely!" and there was, at her finger's ends, she altered her posithis time, a little faint streak of something tion, shaded her countenance still more, in her smile, that Mr. Aspenall had never and drew the note up so that she might before seen in smile of hers, which both read it unperceived by the old gentleman, pleased and puzzled him extremely. who was just then reading to her so vehemently. But this did not prevent the fit. The next day, being Monday, the 20th of August, of the year of grace 179-, about one hour after noon, Mr. Aspenall, sagely reflecting upon the benefits his reading had imparted to the health and spirits of his wife on the day before, proposed reading to her, and that he should continue the story which had been before interrupted by her fainting in the arbour. He promised, however, to read with so much of the discretion of mediocrity, indeed, that he would pass over the most affecting parts so tamely, that he would not produce a single tremor on the most delicate of her nerves. The lady graciously assented, and assumed the most composing attitude, that down pillows, cushions, and a yielding sofa could afford. Mr. Aspenall put on his spectacles, rang out, by the means of his handkerchief, a clarion prelude from his horny nose, deliberately found the place where he had left off so many months before, and, at first, began to drawl forth his words in a manner so monotonous, that would have been the envy of any clerk of parliament, that ever read short a long petition to a yawning house. The breathings of the lady gradually became more gentle, and at long intervals, whilst the reader began to warm upon his subject, and without being aware of the fact, his voice grew louder and his emphasis more startling. So concentrated was his attention upon himself, that, though his eyes must have seen, his judgment did not perceive, that Mrs. Aspenall's own maid stole gently into the room, on her tiptoes. Being well assured that her master was reading, for the deaf only could have doubted that--but not quite so sure that her mistress was sleeping, she dare not speak; she stole softly up to the lady, and not at all clandestinely, but very gently placed a little note upon the sofa, in such a manner, that one part of it rested upon her delicate hand. If her mistress slept, the abigail knew that the moment she awoke she would perceive the billet. Having performed this little feat, entirely to her own satisfaction, with elongated body she sneaked forth hastily from the storm of words, and in much the same way as a cat would do through a smart shower of rain. Mr. Aspenal read on. The lover, in his tale, was a passionate lover, and too apt to use passionate expressions-expressions much loved by the reader, and that had beguiled him gradually from his monotony and caution. "Heaven, earth, Mr. Aspenall read on. Now her bosom heaved convulsively-her dress rustleda low choking sob might have been distinctly heard by any one in the room that was not reading himself into a passion of self-conceit. Still the lady preserved her reclining posture, whilst she thrust frantically and deeply into her bosom, the pernicious piece of paper that she had just received. Mr. Aspena! read on. His wife is no longer recumbent. She is sitting rigidly upright-her eyes are fixed in a wild stare her hands are clenched-and, though those clenched hands are resting on her knees, her arms are violently stretched forth. Unobservant of these symptoms of agony, the husband's voice gathers force-he is at the crisis of his tale-the lover has no prospect of relief before him, and he is venting his despair in impassioned sentences, when the poor Griselda, seeming to take up the thread of the narrative, shrieks out, "My God, my God, he will die! And where is she who should stand by the pillow of the dying-of the broken-hearted? 0 where, where, where?" and uttering another long and unearthly cry, she falls back upon the sofa, to all appearance a corpse. Mr. Aspenall started upon his legs, threw his book through one pane of glass, and his spectacles through another. There was no occasion for calls, or the ringing of bells to bring assistance, the whole household was in the room in an instant. The shriek seemed to have shaken the mansion to its foundations. "Cursed fool that I am!" exclaimed the poor old man; "what have I done? a curse upon all love stories-a curse upon my fatal eloquence-I have destroyed the best of wives-I have destroyed my heirbrute, wretch, idiot! Look up, my sweet Griselda-Ludovicus, in that damnable tale, did not die-he was married to his Amanda-he was, indeed he was! Ah, she hears me not-she will never recover -never-never!" He almost spoke the truth. However, they forced him out of the room, and with the assistance of medical advice, after many relapses, Mrs. Aspenall was nearly restored to her usual state of health. Á lady visitor, who called about three days afterwards, to inquire after Mr. Aspenall, a little surprised her husband, by telling him that Mr. St. John had just gone, and with all expedition, to Italy. "Why, why, my good Mrs. Probett? -a good riddance, however." "Do you not know he broke a blood- were no mourners, and no parade-it was vessel last Sunday evening. I wrote to evidently not then conveying its inmate Mrs. Aspenall on Monday morning, ac- on its last journey to the tomb. The horsquainting her wtih the fact. Did she notes that drew it were proceeding at a slow mention it to you?" 66 Ah, no! why should she? It is to her a matter of the utmost indifference. I am sorry for the youth, however-obstinate as he is. What followed ?" "Oh, they've stopped the slow effusion of blood-indeed, they have hopes of his ultimate recovery. He set off for Italy this morning. He will have all the autumn before him, so he can travel slowly, and winter in a more genial climate. Can I see Mrs. Aspenall?" trot, and it was speculated upon by Mr. Aspenall, that it was taking a body to lie in state, at some place remote from their own village. In the forenoon, the old gentleman took up his hat, and kissing his wife, told her he was going to hear if he could learn anything about it, or any other news at the inn, and little dreaming of the blow that awaited him, he went his way rejoicing. A short time after, all importance, Mrs. Probett entered with her budget of news "O yes-she is much better. Go up-they were news indeed. Mr. St. John stairs and chat with her." had reached Italy in improved health-an Mrs. Probett did so, and Mrs. Aspenall old uncle had died and left him an imrapidly recovered her health and spirits. mense fortune, and then, unaccountably, This is the history of fytte the second. he grew much worse-he was returning to Well, after all this, things went on smil- his native land to die-but had died ere he ingly enough. Mr. Aspenall took great reached it-and had ordered that his body glory to himself for forbearing to be too should be interred in this very village. eloquent in the presence of his wife. The The hearse containing it had arrived this new curate was a young man, that swal-morning. lowed the squire's dinners and instructions in reading, with equal complacency. He had a great capacity for both. Mrs. Aspenall again attended the parish church, and was no more shocked by hearing the service ill read, in a broken and tremulous voice. In due time, Trismegistus was born, and, in due time, Trismegistus was christened, and it could not then be discovered, that either his father's eloquence, or his mother's fits, had at all impaired his constitution. As I have before mentioned, this little gentleman had just betaken himself to shorts, and a second course, in the shape of spoon-meat to his maternal milk, when the last and fatal hysteria supervened. The health of Mrs. Aspen all had been neither better nor worse than usual. Her husband had not been reading to her; indeed, nothing had occurred which might have been supposed to have disturbed the equanimity of her mind. With all her apparent softness of temperament and yieldingness of disposition, she must have been a woman of strong mental powers. It is great heroism to keep a worm gnawing at the heart, and, from respect for the feelings of others, never to cry out. It is the heroism of woman only. She had, on the day of her death, eaten her breakfast with her accustomed appetite-nothing had broken the uniformity of the everyday occurrences that were passing around her, excepting that she, with the rest o the family, had seen a plain hearse pass by the drawing-room windows. There Mrs. Aspenall had listened to all this with a wonderful seeming apathy, she had shown every courtesy to her guest, and that guest had departed with the impression that she had poured an indifferent tale into an indifferent ear. When, an hour after, Mr. Aspenall returned, his wife was found dead, with poor little Trismegistus struggling and screaming to get from the embrace that held him in a state almost of strangulation to his mother's bosom. We will hurry over an interval of hor ror. It was formally notified to the distracted Mr. Aspenall, that Emanuel St. John had left, by the most scrupulously legal will, all his wealth, without reservation, to Mrs. Aspenall and her child. On searching the desk and drawersof the deceased lady, no letters or papers of any description were discovered-the only singular thing found was the button, and piece of threadbare cloth that her husband had plucked away from the coat of Mr. St. John. It was carefully preserved. The eyes of Mr. Aspenall were opened, but this closed not his heart. The two bodies were buried at the same time, in one vault, in the village churchyard. Unconsciously, I have written the loves of Emanuel and Griselda, without it having been known that a single word concerning love ever passed between them. And thus endeth the first of the Trismegistian Records. THE LONELY TREE. BY MKS. ABDY. THOU lonely tree, that on the mountain standing, In life I often thus sad homage render To some fine mind, removed from grovelling ken, Beyond the reach or touch of common men; It shares a fate like thine-thou lonely tree. Stay, from a cloud a sunbeam brightly darting But resting long on thy majestic height; When I lament the gloomy elevation That talent holds, this scene may I recall, That upward towers, like thee, O lonely tree! SKETCHES OF BOHEMIA, AND BY HENRY REEVE, ESQ. centre of Europe, and herself belonging to the German empire, was the principal theatre and the constant victim. The territory of Bohemia, now a province of the Austrian Empire, is of a regular rhomboidal figure, the angles of which A THOUSAND years ago, before the wan- are turned to the four cardinal points of dering tribes of the East and of the North the compass. The whole country in enhad subsided from the violence of their closed by four chains of mountains; and irruption into quiet possession of the seats the fertile basin, thus seperated from the of modern nations, the great Slavonian neighbouring kingdoms, is inhabited by race occupied the largest, if not the fair- a population of four millions of men, the est, portion of the European continent. majority of whom have retained the pure Its territories extended from the Elbe to Slavonian character, manners, and lanthe Black Sea, and from the Danube to guage, notwithstanding the long hostility the far North. Empires vying in extent of the house of Austria, the perpetual colwith that of Charlemagne, were created lision of the surrounding German states, and dissolved. The promises of chris-and the final subjugation of Bohemia to tian civilisation were more than once the court of Vienna. blighted by the incursive tribes of Magy- The City of Prague stands in the centre ars and Tatars, which incessantly besieg-of the sixteen circles into which this reed this eastern rampart of Europe. And gion is divided. It was once the heart of at a very early period, a srtuggle between a nation advanced in free institutions, the German and the Slavonian races eminent for all the arts, and glorious for began, of which Bohemia, seated in the opinions and for arms. It was the cradle leaving the Elbe to indicate their path, after they had subsided. These same cliffs are crested with impregnable citadels, which have baffled Frederic the Great and the French marshals. Around us, amidst the peaks, the twisted roots, the rugged masses and taper needles of this singular region, were marked very visible traces of the robbers, who once made it their retreat. Much of their masonry still remains; and on the summit of the most isolated pinnacle, which cannot be reach of Protestantism; and the Protestant church has now almost ceased to exist within its boundaries. It was the "horreum imperii et nutricula imperatoris ;" and the seat of empire now is removed from it. But in the character and manners of the the Bohemian people, and in the splendid edifices of the capital, the proudest monuments of their long great ness still remain. The following notes were written on a journey undertaken in the course of last summer to explore the country, the history, and the present con-ed by any means we now possess, there dition of the Bohemians, and the western populations of Slavonian origin. I. THE BANKS OF THE ELBE. is an archway distinctly hewn into a kind of sentry-box, which is said to have been a hermit's cell, or a warder's tower. But long after these fastnesses had ceased to harbour their lawless masters, they became the retreat of persecuted Protestants in the thirty years' war: and many of the wildest spots which we visited-as so many others have done before us-have retained an historical name from the sufferings of those martyrs to their religion and their race. On the great Winterberg mountain we entered the Bohemian territory, and the fine estate of Prince Clary. We dined at the Prebischer-Thor, as they call an immense slab of rock lying bridgewise from the perpendicular side of the mountain to the top of a huge needle, which thus forms a natural gateway, nearly one hundred feet high, hanging over the deep dell. From this spot we left the beaten track of the Saxon Switzerland, and descended along the banks of a mountain rivulet, which takes its course from the clearest and coolest of springs, turns a number of sawing-mills in the valley, and falls into the Elbe at Herrnskretschen. We followed its course to the village, where a boat was in waiting to convey us up the river. We left Dresden on a fine morning in August, to cross the chain of mountains called the Erzgebirge, which divide Bohemia from the Saxon dominions. The Elbe, which rises in the east of Bohemia, and flows about one hundred and fifty miles through that territory, enters Saxony in the picturesque region which is known under the name of the Saxon Switzerland. We drove along the sandy banks of the river near Dresden, and as the wind was fresh, the big barges, rigged like junks, were sailing up the stream nearly as fast as our Saxon kutscher chose to go. Our first post was at Pirna, which was a kind of custom-house or frontiergate for creeds during the religious wars. It was the first place in the Protestant states; and during the great persecution of 1622, the little town was the asylum of the Protestant emigrants, to the number of ten thousand, who were expelled from their homes and their estates by Ferdinand II., carrying with them the best talents of the country in arts, manufactures, and agriculture. We crossed the Elbe in a ferry-boat, nearly under the old Castle of Sonnenstein-a forest that was dismantled after the Seven years' war, and converted into a lunatic asylum. In these mournful walls the engraver Müller died insane, after completing his great work from the Madonna di San Sisto, which has coupled his name with that of Ra-ing upon the smooth water; the willows phael. On reaching the right bank of the Elbe, the road quits the river, and gradually rises into a region where the scenery assumes a wilder character. We drove through pine-woods, interspersed with meadows sparkling with the mountaingreen, and fringed with purple heath, or the wild anemone, the snow drop of summer. The road leads insensibly to the top of precipices, which look down 1,200 feet perpendicular into the Elbe. It is a little world for geology and romance: before us lay scattered cliffs, and fantastic rocks, worn by the tremendous irruption of the waters which once made a lake of the whole cauldron basin of Bohemia, till they burst across the north of Europe, VOL. III. 28 Perhaps no European river combines a greater variety of scenery than the Elbe. From Hamburg to the sea, it presents those flat and cold scenes to which the Dutch painters have given a charm. A few days before, I had seen upon it the boats of Van der Velde with their red sails shaped like bats' wings, and the broad poop rest of Reubens studded the marsh-ditches with their grey-green colouring; and as we look back upon the small craft, with here and there a trading brig which crossed the flat prospect, the gleam of Van der Neer shot along the hazy distance. Higher up sits Dresden, with her bridge, her palaces, and churches, garlanded with statues and coronets in the midst of a landscape of singular amenity. But where we entered Bohemia, the Elbe is pent up between bold cliffs and huge natural battlements of rock, clothed in rich foliage wherever it is possible for a tree to hang, and broken by smooth plots of verdure, leading away into romantic dells. It has all the variety of our own Wye, on almost the scale of the majestic Rhine. As we mounted the stream, we met long barks shooting down it, laden with timber, and the manufactures of the county: the barge men devoutly crossing themselves before the statue of St. Adalbert, as they passed it on their voyage, and stopping to help a vessel which the saint had allowed to run aground upon the shallows. Higher up, the banks of the river assume a broader character, and the land sloping down to them displays more cultivation. As we entered Count T's estate, cottages were seen peeping out from the orchards, and cheerful peasants working in their gardens. At length a wider reach of the Elbe brought us to the town of Tetschen, lying at the foot of its great castle, with an amphitheatre of mountains beyond. Everything bore marks of activity and prosperity in the little port; new store houses are erected in the town-a quay for the barges runs along the shore, and a ferry-boat was constantly plying from the side on which the castle stands to the other bank. Within ten years the population of the town, which now amounts to 2,000, has been greatly increased, new sources of prosperity opened, and honourable fortunes made by men who entered the estate in the humblest mercantile capacity. These excellent results are attributable to the natural position of the place, and still more to the judicious administration of the lord. The wealth of the mountainous frontiers of Bohemia consists chiefly in their timber and their manufactories impelled by the water powers of the mountain streams. Their immediate contact with Saxony and Prussia introduces a number of industrious Germans, whose language prevails in these tracts, whilst the impoverished Slavonian population cultivates the central agricultural basin of the country. It cannot be doubted that the superiority of wealth and intelligence is on the side of the frontier population, especially to the north. The ircle of Leitme ritz, in whicn Tetshen and Teplitz are situated, is the most populous in the kingdom; and, in some parts of it, the number of inhabitants amonnts to 17,000 per 25 square English miles. The domains of the Bohemian nobility are so large, that they may be compared to small tributary states. The Herrschaft or Lordship of Tetschen contains no less than 18,000 souls. Tracts of land are granted by the lord on terms not very dissimilar to the original grant of copyhold property in England: but in Bohemia the rent is still paid, for the most part, by a certain number of days of labour done for the lord, the amount of which is regulated by a law called the Roboth patent. The subjects, as they are termed, are all registered in the books of the estate; the lord collects the king's taxes, besides his own dues, and sends an annual supply of recruits to the imperial army. He has the power of expelling misdemeanants from his estate, and he exercises a certain control over his subjects; but the peasants are by no means attached to the soil; and they may always appeal to the courts of justice against their lord, with a proverbial certainty (such is the policy of the government) of gaining their cause. On the other hand, the lord represents the government to his peasants, and the peasants to the government; and whilst he is accountable to the justice of the country, he has it in his power to exercise a beneficent influence over the lower orders. He provides for their instruction, he introduces improvements and encourages trade, he increases their commercial relations, he arbitrates in their disputes, and in proportion to his fulfilment or neglect of these functions, the estate is prosperous or poor. It often happens that the nobility and gentry have acquired a purely German character, in accordance with that of the Austrian government, but very much opposed to the national spirit and national wants of the Bohemian people. All the ancient seignorial rights which were not legalised and regulated by Joseph II., as the Roboth, dues, &c., were abolished by that monarch. But the tradition of feudal attachment and of feudal obedience, still exists amongst the people; thus, although the consent of the lord is not legally required to a marriage between his peasants, it is generally asked, and considered indispensable. The possessions of some of the Bohemian nobles are immense; Prince Schwarzemberg owns oneeighth of the country; and the estates once held by the great Wallenstein were so vast as to have formed the appanage of six great families after his death and attainder. The Castle of Tetschen stands upon a rock about 150 feet above the Elbe: the building is in the form of a complete oval, with a lofty turret at one end, which commands a view of the town, the river with its barges, and the romantic Rothberg, with its huge rocky bastions and rich crown of wood. For my own part, I know of no higher or more humane pleasure than to look out across the smiling and animated landscape, from a window of that pile, with a consciousness that the rank and power seated on that rock has made itself the friend and protector of all that is good below it, and has thrown a smile into every cottage in those secluded valleys. The castle has seen its days of danger, it has been shaken by civil war, and untenanted by persecution; but never did the mansion of a lord stand more firmly planted in its best defence, than the Castle of Tetschen, supported by the af fections of its dependants. After a short sojourn in this hospitable abode we left the castle in a carriage, called a Würste or sausage, which resembles an Irish car, except that it has but one seat |