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There lay Hayde, a compact and apparently well-built town; about three miles to the right of it, and nestling back its own cliffs, was Burgstein; while farther off Gabel, Reichstadt, with a countless number of villages besides, told of the busy hands by which these fair fields were tilled and kept in order.
Like other buildings of the kind which we had passed in our tour, the schloss at Burgstein resembles a manufactory much more than a nobleman's palace; for it stands close to the high road, is roofed over with flaring red tiles, and shows in its dazzling white front a prodigious number of small windows.
There remains one apartment more, which it would be unjustifiable in me to omit particularly to notice, inasmuch as it holds a high place in the estimation of the good people of Burgstein, and will, if it serve no other purpose, force a smile from such young, aye, and old persons, too, as may happen to inspect it.
We quitted Hayde without regret; and though still foot-sore with yesterday's travel, contrived to reach Burgstein, which is about three English miles distant, between twelve and one o'clock. It is an inconsiderable village, prettily situated under the felsen, or crags, from which it derives its name; and can boast of its schloss, the residence of Graff Kinsky, as yet a child.
The only innovations effected, indeed, in the original arrangements of the castle, are those which the hermit began; and which the father of the present lord, the Count Kinsky, of whom I have already spoken, has completed. The history of the Burgstein, as far as I have been able to trace it, is this.
The present possessor of the rock castle has had the figure restored. Burgstein remained the abode of a hermit till 1785, when the reforming Joseph II. abolished all hermitages, and turned out every hermit in his dominions. And now, back to the Jura limestone again. A few words must be given to Kronmetz in Tirol, at the mouth of the Val di Non, opening into the Etschthal.
In 1811 there was a fall of the rock, and again in 1815, when it crushed three of the houses beneath. Another and still more curious cliff castle in Bohemia is that of Burgstein. There are several on the frontier of the Wargau and the Hardt in North Bohemia, where the German and Czech languages meet, but it is not possible here to describe them all. Burgstein is the most curious.
We therefore felt ourselves under the necessity of confining our day's operations to the inspection of a hermitage, or einsiedlerstein, near Burgstein, with what was described to us as a short and pleasant walk afterwards, as far as Gabel.
Sufficient for both our purposes it will be to observe, that everything is in the most perfect state of preservation, and that he who is desirous of obtaining a tolerably accurate notion of the sort of style in which the barons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries used to live, may find it worth his while to make a journey even as far as Burgstein.
Soon after, however, he recommenced his lawless proceedings, and was again attacked in 1445, and after a siege that lasted five weeks, forced to quit his fortress. At the end of the seventeenth century Burgstein was converted into a hermitage and Brother Constantine, the first hermit, either enlarged or dug out the present chapel and built the lantern above, through which it obtains light.
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