266 The Durrenstein. [Serr 
worth living even in a German Wirthhaus for‘a twelvemonth to see. 
And, certainly, when the first surprise allowed us to look en philosophe, 
at the phenomenon, nothing could be more attractive. It seemed a 
phantasmagoria of the most vivid kind, not the puzzled and misty light 
that makes our magic-lantern figures as hard to be traced as a hierogly- 
phic, and deserving of the lynx eyes of M. Champollion alone; but an 
intense and steady splendour, that actually rekindled the faded gilding 
and perished purple velvet of monarchs, plumed chevaliers, and dames 
of pride, beauty, and distended petticoats, glowing from hip to heel with 
every flower of the parterre, an embroidered paradise. at 
I glanced into the open air to ascertain from what meteor, or accidental 
firing of the woods, the light was produced. But, except an occasional 
flash of the exhausted and thinning cloud, darkness had resumed her 
“ leaden sceptre o’er the drowsy world.” The storm had been fairly 
tired out, and the grim coronal of Durrenstein was distinguishable only 
by the phosphoric glimmer of the torrent still tumbling down the front 
of the mountain. 
I was suddenly recalled from my view by a general exclamation. 
Across the ceiling, which had hitherto looked as black as its pitch-pine 
rafters could have made it, the procession of knights and dames was 
again glittering, and in the rear of the procession moved a shape that we 
all with one voice pronounced to be the Red Woman of Durrenstein 
herself, or something worse, if our gallantry would allow us to conceive 
it invested in the female garb. The shape was covered from head to 
foot with a cloak of the most powerfully sanguine colour ; but under the 
hood looked out a face, which, whether it was fact, or the heated fancy 
of gentlemen loving their wine “ not wisely but too well,’ contained all 
the ingredients of hazard to hearts and heads. It was excessively lovely, 
but with a pair of wild and deep eyes, that gleamed like the very seats 
of unhappy mystery. She came glittering in prismatic beauty from the 
darkness, like the kings and magicians of Rembrandt, and grew upon us 
until the eye absolutely shrunk from her concentrated lustre. 
The German exclaimed, that “‘ Frauenhoffer himself would be puzzled 
to make such a magic lantern: he would lay ten to one on the point with 
any man.” 
The Italian said, that he “ had seen nothing so bright since the last 
eruption of Vesuvius, nor so beautiful since the last illumination of 
St. Peter’s.” 
The Frenchman was unnationally silent, and sat, with his eyes alter- 
nately turned on the vision and the stranger, who had leaned his head on 
the table, and who, but for a broken word now and then, I should have 
supposed to be asleep, in quiet contempt of our phantom. 
But be it what it might, I found that it had made us all grave, and I 
proposed calling in the landlord, if he should be still out of bed, to tell us 
what he knew of the matter. The little hall was dark as the night itself, 
and while I was feeling my way, awkwardly enough, along the walls, m 
foot struck against a heavy human incumbrance towards the end of the 
passage, which a groan and a few exclamations of alarm told me was 
the valorous Herr Michael. I raised him up, and convincing him, with 
some difficulty, that I was not among the spectral visitors of his sins of 
innkeeping, I rather carried than led him in to our festal room, which, 
however, had now become as silent as any sepulchre in the Abbey of 
Molk. The Herr was a most reluctant witness, and nothing but the 
