And the primordial diluviums and world-old torrents, great and small, rushing down from the Bohemian Highlands, from the Saxon Metal Mountains, with such storming, gurgling and swashing, have swept away the soft parts, and left the hard standing in this chaotic manner, and bequeathed it all to the Elbe, and the common frosts and rains of these human ages.
"Elbe has now a trim course; but Elbe too is busy quarrying and mining, where not artificially held in;--and you notice at every outlet of a Brook from the interior, north side and south side, how busy the Brook has been.

Boring, grinding, undermining; much helped by the frosts, by the rains.

AEons ago, the Brook was a lake, in the interior; but was every moment laboring to get out; till it has cut for itself that mountain gullet, or sheer-down chasm, and brought out with it an Alluvium or Delta,--on which, since Adam's time, human creatures have built a Hamlet.

That is the origin, or unwritten history, of most hamlets and cultivated spots you fall in with here: they are the waste shavings of the Brook, working millions of years, for its own object of getting into the Elbe in level circumstances.

Ploughed fields, not without fertility, are in the interior, if you ascend that Brook; the Hamlet, at the delta or mouth of it, is as if built upon its TONGUE and into its GULLET: think how picturesque, in the November rains, for example! "The road" one road, "from Dresden to Aussig, to Lobositz, Budin, Prag, runs up the river-brink (south brink); or, in our day, as Prag-Dresden Railway, thunders through those solitudes; strangely awakening their echoes; and inviting even the bewildered Tourist to reflect, if he could.