town of Niedermendig, an hour’s distance from the lake—­a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters, but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones.  There is something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who have seen those dreary slate-villages—­dark, damp, but naked, for moss and weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the decay of other stones—­which dot the moorland of Wales.  The fences are slate; the gateposts are slate; the stiles are of slate; the very “sticks” up which the climbing roses are trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses, stables are all of one dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike; hearth-stones and threshold-stones, and grave-stones all of the same material.  It is curious and depressing.  This volcanic region of the Rhine, however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia, where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and steam are always rising.

[Footnote A:  From “Down the Rhine.”]

BINGEN AND MAYENCE[A]

BY VICTOR HUGO

Bingen is an exceedingly pretty place, having at once the somber look of an ancient town, and the cheering aspect of a new one.  From the days of Consul Drusus to those of the Emperor Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Archbishop Willigis, from Willigis to the merchant Montemagno, and from Montemagno to the visionary Holzhausen, the town gradually increased in the number of its houses, as the dew gathers drop by drop in the cup of a lily.  Excuse this comparison; for, tho flowery, it has truth to back it, and faithfully illustrates the mode in which a town near the conflux of two rivers is constructed.  The irregularity of the houses—­in fact everything, tends to make Bingen a kind of antithesis, both with respect to buildings and the scenery which surrounds them.  The town, bounded on the left by Nahe, and by the Rhine on the right, develops itself in a triangular form near a Gothic church, which is backed by a Roman citadel.  In this citadel, which bears the date of the first century, and has long been the haunt of bandits, there is a garden; and in the church, which is of the fifteenth century, is the tomb of Barthelemy de Holzhausen.  In the direction of Mayence, the famed Paradise Plain opens upon the Ringau; and in that of Coblentz, the dark mountains of Leyen seem to frown on the surrounding scenery.  Here Nature smiles like a lovely woman extended unadorned on the greensward; there, like a slumbering giant, she excites a feeling of awe.

The more we examine this beautiful place, the more the antithesis is multiplied under our looks and thoughts.  It assumes a thousand different forms; and as the Nahe flows through the arches of the stone bridge, upon the parapet of which the lion of Hesse turns its back to the eagle of Prussia, the green arm of the Rhine seizes suddenly the fair and indolent stream, and plunges it into the Bingerloch.