1828:] [ 267 J 
THE DURRENSTEIN. 
Tue valley of the Wachau, or rather the whole tract of the Danube, 
from Rosenburg to where the river falls into the plain of Vienna, is 
proverbially one of the most fantastic and beautiful of the south of 
Europe. A succession of all that makes the romance of landscape, 
perpetually varies before the eye; stupendous crags, deep and sunless 
defiles, solemn woods, that look as old as the days of Arminius, and 
whose paths had often heard the trampling and the shouts of the tribes 
on their march to shake the empires of the world; wailing whirlpools, 
and the central mighty stream, the father Danube himself, that unites 
the cross with the crescent, and pours the waters of the German hills 
to wash the foot of the seraglio. 
But this striking country is not yet plagued with the more than 
Egyptian plague, of being a regular haunt of summer tourists. The 
honest citizens of Vienna, almost within sight of the valley, are luckily 
bern without the organ of tourism, and have substituted for it the organ 
of cooking, fiddling, and the patrician love of a Sunday’s drive over the 
pavement of the Leopoldstat, or the plebeian love of a Sunday’s walk in 
the Prater. 
The Italian never travels, but for purposes which have more of 
philosophy than of the passion for sight seeing. He travels for the 
general good of mankind, for without him, half the dwellings of conti- 
nental Europe would be buried by the soot of their own chimnies, the 
fabric of wooden spoons and plaster images would be lost to mankind ; 
and there would be a mortality among dancing dogs, and fantoccini, from 
Paris to Petersburg. The Frenchman never travels at all, and will 
never travel while he can find all the charms of coffee, ecarté, quadrilling, 
and courtship, within the walls of one city. 
Even the English have scarcely found their way to this fine tract. 
No circulating library has yet shown its front, placarded with new novels 
from top to toe. No newspaper establishment contributes scandal to the 
great, and perplexes the little with politics on the most puzzling scale. 
No steaim-boat throws up its blackening column to distain the blue of 
the native sky for many a league behind, and no spruce bugler on the 
top of the brilliantly varnished and high-flying stage coach, shoots along 
before the startled eye, at the rate of twenty miles an hour “ stoppages 
included,” making the precipices ring to the echoes of “I’ve been 
roaming.” 
All is solitude, loftiness, and sacred silence, broken but bya gush of 
the waters foaming round some rock, or the cry of the kites and falcons 
as they sweep over the summits of the wilderness of oaks and pines. 
Yet the traveller sometimes makes his way into this scene of state- 
liness ; and twenty years ago, 1 ranged the region during a whole 
summer, until the doubt with the peasantry lay between my being a 
ician, a madman, or an agent of Napoleon, fraught with a portfolio 
of defiles, bridges, waters, and passes, which were were to bring La 
Grande Armée headlong upon their cottages in the next war. But, 
luckily, the native love of tranquillity prevailed ; and as I paid for my 
provisions with English punctuality, and without Austrian remonstrance 
at the little tax which they added to their price, as a cure for conscience 
in thus assisting the enemies of their country; as I made love to no 
man’s female establishment, and shot no great lord’s game, I was suf- 
M.M. New Series.—Vou. VI. No. 33. 21L 
