the central character of "the Principality of
_Waldeck_" connected securely with that important German word;
'woody'--or 'wood_ish_,' I suppose?--descriptive of rock and
half-grown forest; together with some wholesome reverence for Scott's
instinctively deep foundations of nomenclature.

19. But for our present purpose we must also take seriously to our
maps again, and get things within linear limits of space.

All the maps of Germany which I have myself the privilege of possessing,
diffuse themselves, just north of Frankfort, into the likeness of a
painted window broken small by Puritan malice, and put together again by
ingenious churchwardens with every bit of it wrong side upwards;--this
curious vitrerie purporting to represent the sixty, seventy, eighty, or
ninety dukedoms, marquisates, counties, baronies, electorates, and the
like, into which hereditary Alemannia cracked itself in that latitude.
But under the mottling colours, and through the jotted and jumbled
alphabets of distracted dignities--besides a chain-mail of black
railroads over all, the chains of it not in links, but bristling
with legs, like centipedes,--a hard forenoon's work with good
magnifying-glass enables one approximately to make out the course of the
Weser, and the names of certain towns near its sources, deservedly
memorable.

20. In case you have not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste,
this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,--that from the
Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north,
there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious
craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and
fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly
castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;--the glens,
resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly
tenanted farther, underground, by gnomes, and above by forest and other
demons. The entire district, clasping crag to crag, and guiding dell to
dell, some hundred and fifty miles (with intervals) between the Dragon
mountain above Rhine, and the Rosin mountain, 'Hartz' shadowy still to
the south of the riding grounds of Black Brunswickers of indisputable
bodily presence;--shadowy anciently with 'Hercynian' (hedge, or fence)
forest, corrupted or coinciding into Hartz, or Rosin forest, haunted by
obscurely apparent foresters of at least resinous, not to say
sulphurous, extract