If we should pass from Scotland to the north-east part of Ireland, taking Staffa in our way, we should find in the basaltic columns of Fingal's Cave, and the Giant's Causeway, what seems, at first view, to be stupendous human structures, or rather the architecture of giants. But you soon find it to be only an example--
"Where nature works as if defying art, And, in defiance of her rival powers, By these fortuitous and random strokes, Performing such inimitable feats, As she, with all her rules, can never reach."
Let any one sail along the coast for a few miles at the Giant's Causeway, enter some of the deep and echoing caverns, overhung by the basaltic mass, and see the columns rising tier above tier, sometimes four hundred feet in height, and assuming every wild and fantastic shape; or let him walk over the acres of columns, whose tops are as perfectly polygonal and as accurately fitted to one another as the most skilful architect could make them, and he will confess how superior Nature is, when she would present a model for human imitation; and how with accurate system she can combine the wildest disorder, and thus delight by symmetry, while she awes by sublimity.
Let us next pass over to continental Europe. We have reached the Rhine at Bonn, and the steamboat takes us at once into the midst of the romantic Drachenfels, or seven mountains, the result of volcanic agency, and still presenting more or less of the conical outline peculiar almost to modern volcanoes. These are the commencement of the romantic scenery of the Rhine. From thence to Bingen, some sixty or seventy miles, that river has cut its way through hills and mountains, sometimes rising one thousand feet. Along their base, the inhabitants have planted many a well-known town, while old castles, half crumbled down, recall continually the history of feudal ages; and here, too, springs up a multitude of remembrances of startling events in more recent times. The mind, indeed, finds itself drawn at one moment to some historical monument, and the next to scenery of surpassing beauty or sublimity; now the bold, overhanging rock, now the deep recess, now the towering mountain, now the quiet dell with its romantic villages; while every where on the north bank, the vine-clad terraces show us what wonders human industry can accomplish.