make a spring to that time, and we are again at Trollhätta.

I came here in the autumn, on my return home; stayed some days in this
mighty piece of nature, where busy human life forces its way more and
more in, and, by degrees, transforms the picturesque to the useful
manufactory. Trollhätta must do her work; saw beams, drive mills,
hammer and break to pieces: one building grows up by the side of the
other, and in half a century hence here will be a city. But that was
not the story.

I came, as I have said, here again in the autumn. I found the same
rushing and roaring, the same din, the same rising and sinking in the
sluices, the same chattering boys who conducted fresh travellers to
the Hell Fall, to the iron-bridge island, and to the inn. I sat here,
and turned over the leaves of books, collected here through a series
of years, in which travellers have inscribed their names, feelings and
thoughts at Trollhätta--almost always the same astonishment, expressed
in different languages, though generally in Latin: _veni, vidi,
obstupui_.

One has written: "I have seen nature's master-piece pervade that of
art;" another cannot say what he saw, and what he saw he cannot say. A
mine owner and manufacturer, full of the doctrine of utility, has
written: "Seen with the greatest pleasure this useful work for us in
Värmeland, Trollhätta." The wife of a dean from Scania expresses
herself thus. She has kept to the family, and only signed in the
remembrance book, as to the effect of her feelings at Trollhätta. "God
grant my brother-in-law fortune, for he has understanding!" Some few
have added witticisms to the others' feelings; yet as a pearl on this
heap of writing shines Tegner's poem, written by himself in the book