No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing.  My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel.  I left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd. with a letter of introduction from the poet Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg.  The Amtmann received me with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month.  The vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the human.  Its top was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots.  Instead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each:  they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold.  I could observe little, therefore, but the inns and farm-houses at which we stopped.  They were all alike, except in size:  one great room, like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor of the loft.  From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end.  These are commonly floored.  In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community:  yet there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort.  One of these houses I measured.  It was an hundred feet in length.  The apartments were taken off from one corner.  Between these and the stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight feet in depth.  The faces of the cows &c. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing each other’s faces.  Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite opinions—­or at least, to have very different feelings.  The wood-work of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily.  From within three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country, as far as I could see it was a dead flat, only varied by woods.  At Molln it became more beautiful.  I observed a small lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests.  We were nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six miles.