On a hill in the midst of a great Austrian plain, around which high Alps wait watching through the ages, stands a venerable fortress¹, almost more beautiful than anything one has ever seen. Perhaps, if it were not for the great plain flowering broadly about it with its wide-spread beauties of meadow-land, and wood, and dim toned buildings gathered about farms, and its dream of a small ancient city at its feet, it might—though it is to be doubted—seem something less a marvel² of medieval picturesqueness³. But out of the plain rises the low hill, and surrounding it at a stately distance stands guard the giant majesty⁴ of Alps, with shoulders in the clouds and god-like heads above them, looking on—always looking on—sometimes themselves ethereal clouds of snow-whiteness, some times monster bare crags which pierce the blue, and whose unchanging silence seems to know the secret of the everlasting⁵. And on the hill which this august circle holds in its embrace, as though it enclosed a treasure, stands the old, old, towered fortress built as a citadel⁶ for the Prince Archbishops, who were kings in their domain⁷ in the long past centuries when the splendor⁸ and power of ecclesiastical princes was among the greatest upon earth.