to the eye what effects a great imaginative painter may produce with no other colors than light and darkness.  Here are the “stately height,” the “ample spaces,” the “arched roof,” the rows of “starry lamps and blazing cressets” of Satan’s hall of council; and by the excited fancy the dim distance is easily peopled with gigantic forms and filled with the “rushing of congregated wings.”

After this, one is led through a variety of chambers, differing in size and form, but essentially similar in character, and the attention is invited to the innumerable multitude of striking and fantastic objects which have been formed in the lapse of ages, by the mere dropping of water.  Pendants hang from the roof, stalagmites grow from the floor like petrified stumps, and pillars and buttresses are disposed as oddly as in the architecture of a dream.  Here, we are told to admire a bell, and there, a throne; here, a pulpit, and there, a butcher’s shop; here, “the two hearts,” and there, a fountain frozen into alabaster; and in every case we assent to the resemblance in the unquestioning mood of Polonius.  One of the chambers, or halls, is used every year as a ball-room, for which purpose it has every requisite except an elastic floor, even to a natural dais for the orchestra.

Here, with the sort of pride with which a book collector shows a Mazarin Bible or a folio Shakespeare, the guides point out a beautiful piece of limestone which hangs from the roof in folds as delicate as a Cashmere shawl, to which the resemblance is made more exact by a well-defined border of deeper color than the web.  Through this translucent curtain the light shines as through a picture in porcelain, and one must be very unimpressible not to bestow the tribute of admiration which is claimed.  These are the trivial details which may be remembered and described, but the general effect produced by the darkness, the silence, the vast spaces, the innumerable forms, the vaulted roofs, the pillars and galleries melting away in the gloom like the long-drawn aisles of a cathedral, may be recalled but not communicated.

To see all these marvels requires much time, and I remained under ground long enough to have a new sense of the blessing of light.  The first glimpse of returning day seen through the distant entrance brought with it an exhilarating sense of release, and the blue sky and cheerful sunshine were welcomed like the faces of long absent friends.  A cave like that of Adelsberg—­for all limestone caves are, doubtless, essentially similar in character—­ought by all means to be seen if it comes in one’s way, because it leaves impressions upon the mind unlike those derived from any other object.  Nature stamps upon most of her operations a certain character of gravity and majesty.  Order and symmetry attend upon her steps, and unity in variety is the law by which her movements are guided.  But, beneath the surface of the earth, she seems a frolicsome child, or a sportive undine, who wreaths the unmanageable