Before entering Spain we must look at the Circus of Gavarni, a natural amphitheatre in the Pyrenees.  It is the most picturesque of stereographs, and one of the best.  As for the Alhambra, we can show that in every aspect; and if you do not vote the lions in the court of the same a set of mechanical h——­gs and nursery bugaboos, we have no skill in entomology.  But the Giralda, at Seville, is really a grand tower, worth looking at.  The Seville Boston-folks consider it the linchpin, at least, of this rolling universe.  And what a fountain this is in the Infanta’s garden! what shameful beasts, swine and others, lying about on their stomachs! the whole surmounted by an unclad gentleman squeezing another into the convulsions of a galvanized frog!  Queer tastes they have in the Old World.  At the Fountain of the Ogre in Berne, the giant, or large-mouthed private person, upon the top of the column, is eating a little infant as one eats a radish, and has plenty more,—­a whole bunch of such,—­in his hand, or about him.

A voyage down the Rhine shows us nothing better than St. Goar, (No. 2257,) every house on each bank clean and clear as a crystal.  The Heidelberg views are admirable;—­you see a slight streak in the background of this one:  we remember seeing just such a streak from the castle itself, and being told that it was the Rhine, just visible, afar off.  The man with the geese in the goose-market at Nuremberg gives stone, iron, and bronze, each in perfection.

So we come to quaint Holland, where we see windmills, ponts-levis, canals, galiots, houses with gable-ends to the streets and little mirrors outside the windows, slanted so as to show the frows inside what is going on.

We must give up the cathedrals, after all:  Santa Maria del Fiore, with Brunelleschi’s dome, which Michel Angelo wouldn’t copy and couldn’t beat; Milan, aflame with statues, like a thousand-tapered candelabrum; Tours, with its embroidered portal, so like the lace of an archbishop’s robe; even Notre Dame of Paris, with its new spire; Rouen, Amiens, Chartres,—­we must give them all up.

Here we are at Athens, looking at the buttressed Acropolis and the ruined temples,—­the Doric Parthenon, the Ionic Erechtheum, the Corinthian temple of Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides.  But see those steps cut in the natural rock.  Up those steps walked the Apostle Paul, and from that summit, Mars Hill, the Areopagus, he began his noble address, “Ye men of Athens!”

The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx!  Herodotus saw them a little fresher, but of unknown antiquity,—­far more unknown to him than to us.  The Colossi of the Plain!  Mighty monuments of an ancient and proud civilization standing alone in a desert now.

  My name is Osymandyas, King of Kings;
  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

But nothing equals these vast serene faces of the Pharaohs on the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel (Ipsambul) (No. 1, F. 307).  It Is the sublimest of stereographs, as the temple of Kardasay, this loveliest of views on glass, is the most poetical.  But here is the crocodile lying in wait for us on the sandy bank of the Nile, and we must leave Egypt for Syria.