or of occasional explanation and discussion, as it was partially kept up
between himself and one of his nearest partners in the imputed transgression.
Two or three there might be seen in the crowd whose looks avowed some nearer
acquaintance with this mysterious allusion than it would have been safe to
acknowledge. But, for the great body of spectators who accompanied the prisoners
and their escort to the gates of the castle, it was pretty evident by their
inquiring looks, and the fixed expression of wonder upon their features, that
the whole affair, and its circumstances, were to them equally a subject of
mystery for what was past, and of blind terror for what was to come.
 

                                   Chapter IX

The cavalcade, with its charge of prisoners, and its attendant train of
spectators, halted at the gates of the schloss. This vast and antique pile had
now come to be surveyed with dismal and revolting feelings, as the abode of a
sanguinary despot. The dungeons and labyrinths of its tortuous passages, its
gloomy halls of audience, with the vast corridors which surmounted the
innumerable flights of stairs - some noble, spacious, and in the Venetian taste,
capable of admitting the march of an army - some spiral, steep, and so unusually
narrow as to exclude two persons walking abreast; these, together with the
numerous chapels erected in it to different saints by devotees, male or female,
in the families of forgotten Landgraves through four centuries back; and finally
the tribunals, or gericht-kammern, for dispensing justice, criminal or civil, to
the city and territorial dependencies of Klosterheim; - all united to compose a
body of impressive images, hallowed by great historical remembrances, or
traditional stories, that from infancy to age dwelt upon the feelings of the
Klosterheimers. Terror and superstitious dread predominated undoubtedly in the
total impression; but the gentle virtues exhibited by a series of princes who
had made this their favourite residence naturally enough terminated in mellowing
the sternness of such associations into a religious awe, not without its own
peculiar attractions. But at present, under the harsh and repulsive character of
the reigning Prince, everything took a new colour from his ungenial habits. The
superstitious legends which had so immemorially peopled the schloss with
spectral apparitions now revived in their earliest strength. Never was Germany
more dedicated to superstition in every shape than at this period. The wild
tumultuous times, and the slight tenure upon which all men held their lives,
naturally threw their thoughts much upon the other world; and communications
with that, or its burthen of secrets, by every variety of agencies, ghosts,
divination, natural magic, palmistry, or astrology