s his benediction.

Before entering Spain we must look at the Circus of Gavarni, a
natural amphitheatre in the Pyrenees. It is the most picturesque of
stereographs, and one of the best. As for the Alhambra, we can show that
in every aspect; and if you do not vote the lions in the court of the
same a set of mechanical h----gs and nursery bugaboos, we have no skill
in entomology. But the Giralda, at Seville, is really a grand tower,
worth looking at. The Seville Boston-folks consider it the linchpin,
at least, of this rolling universe. And what a fountain this is in the
Infanta's garden! what shameful beasts, swine and others, lying about on
their stomachs! the whole surmounted by an unclad gentleman squeezing
another into the convulsions of a galvanized frog! Queer tastes they
have in the Old World. At the Fountain of the Ogre in Berne, the giant,
or large-mouthed private person, upon the top of the column, is eating a
little infant as one eats a radish, and has plenty more,--a whole bunch
of such,--in his hand, or about him.

A voyage down the Rhine shows us nothing better than St. Goar, (No.
2257,) every house on each bank clean and clear as a crystal. The
Heidelberg views are admirable;--you see a slight streak in the
background of this one: we remember seeing just such a streak from the
castle itself, and being told that it was the Rhine, just visible, afar
off. The man with the geese in the goose-market at Nuremberg gives
stone, iron, and bronze, each in perfection.

So we come to quaint Holland, where we see windmills, _ponts-levis_,
canals, galiots, houses with gable-ends to the streets and little
mirrors outside the windows, slanted so as to show the frows inside what
is going on.

We must give up the cathedrals, after all: Santa Maria del Fiore, with
Brunelleschi's dome, which Michel Angelo wouldn't copy and couldn't
beat; Milan, aflame with statues, like a thousand-tapered candelabrum;
Tours, with its embroidered portal, so like the lace of an archbishop's
robe; even Notre Dame of Paris, with its new spire; Rouen, Amiens,
Chartres,--we must give them all up.

Here we are at Athens, looking at the buttressed Acropolis and the
ruined temples,--the Doric Parthenon, the Ionic Erechtheum, the
Corinthian temple of Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides. But see
those steps cut in the natural rock. Up those steps walked the Apostle
Paul, and from that summit, Mars Hill, the Areopagus, he began his noble
address,