out of which the hole must, with
infinite labour, have been chiselled. These walls are everywhere
scratched over with representations of wounded hearts, crucifixes,
death's-heads, and even of flowers with broken stems; all of them
clearly enough of very old fabrication, though unfortunately none of
them dated. How many gallant spirits have here pined and fretted
themselves into eternity; how many noble minds and sinewy arms have
long confinement and scanty fare, bowed down to this damp floor and
withered. What a record of misery and wrong would not these walls give
forth, were they for one little hour gifted with the power of speech,
like the talking woods in the fairy tale. And yet, evil as the times
were, when might, not right, was in the ascendant, they had their
redeeming excellencies too. Knightly honour, chivalrous abhorrence of
guile, the soul to endure, as well as the temper to inflict; these were
the qualities most prized by men, who, born and bred to lives of
constant warfare, held danger light, and looked upon peace as
inglorious. And then their religious faith! It might be gloomy, it
might be wild, it might be altogether misplaced or misdirected,--but it
was at least sincere; for it exerted an influence over their most
wayward humours; it urged them both to do and to suffer as none but men
who believed that they acted aright would have done. Let us not, then,
even when standing in the dungeon of a baron's hold, come to the
conclusion, that what we call the dark ages were ages of unmitigated
wrong. They might produce their tyrants and oppressors, whose power, in
proportion as it was resistless, would spread misery around; but they
produced also their vindicators of the oppressed; their Bayards and
Lancelots, _chevalliers sans peur et sans reproche_,--of whose spirit
of candour, and fair and open and honourable dealing, it might be well
if this our intellectual and utilitarian age had inherited even a
portion.

It will scarcely be expected that I am to conduct my reader through all
the crannies and recesses of the Einsiedlerstein. Sufficient for both
our purposes it will be to observe, that everything is in the most
perfect state of preservation, and that he who is desirous of obtaining
a tolerably accurate notion of the sort of style in which the barons of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries used to live, may find it worth
his while to make a journey even as far as Burgstein. Here is the
chapel, entire