rippling silver-clear amid the rocks, washing the bare roots and fibres
of trees. Bend down toward all this ceaseless activity and listen, and
you will hear, as it were, the mysterious history of the growth of the
plants, and the quiet pulsations of the heart of the mountain. In many
places the water jets strongly up amid rocks and roots, forming little
cascades. It is pleasant to sit in such places. There is such a
wonderful murmuring and rustling, the birds pour forth broken lovesick
strains, the trees whisper as if with a thousand maidens' tongues, the
odd mountain flowers peep up at us as if with a thousand maidens' eyes,
stretching out to us their curious, broad, drolly-scalloped leaves; the
sun-rays flash here and there in sport; the herbs, as though endowed
with reason, are telling one another their green legends; all seems
enchanted and it becomes more and more mysterious; an old, old dream is
realized--the loved one appears! Alas, that she so quickly vanishes!

The higher we ascend, so much the shorter and more dwarflike do the
fir-trees become, shrinking up, as it were, within themselves, until
finally only whortleberries, bilberries, and mountain herbs remain. It
is also sensibly colder. Here, for the first time, the granite boulders,
which are frequently of enormous size, become fully visible. These may
well have been the balls which evil spirits cast at one another on the
Walpurgis night, when the witches come riding hither on brooms and
pitchforks, when the mad, unhallowed revelry begins, as our credulous
nurses have told us, and as we may see it represented in the beautiful
Faust pictures of Master Retsch. Yes, a young poet, who, while
journeying from Berlin to Gottingen passed the Brocken on the first
evening in May, even noticed how certain ladies who cultivated
_belles-lettres_, were holding their esthetic tea-circle in a rocky
corner, how they comfortably read aloud the _Evening Journal_, how they
praised as universal geniuses their poetic billy-goats which hopped