It was at a late hour when the party arrived at their destined abode, and the shades of evening had conspired, with the solitude of its situation, to give an air of gloomy magnificence to the scene. The castle, which was seated upon an eminence, about a quarter of a league from the bed of the river, seemed to have been separated by nature from the habitable world by deep and impenetrable woods. Two of the towers, which were all that remained entire, were half secreted in a forest; the others, which were mouldering into ruins, opened into a narrow, uncultivated plain, terminating in a rocky declivity, at the bottom of which flowed the Rhine, wide, deep, and silent. Eleanor Sleath (1770 - 1847) The Orphan of the Rhine A Romance 1798 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Orphan_of_the_Rhine/Volume_1/Chapter_4 https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606561.txt

Painting Moritz von Schwind Der Vater Rhein, die Fidel Volkers spielend ca. 1865 The river god of the Rhine in full armour floating on the water and fiddling on a sort of ancient bow instrument. In the background ruins, rocks and woods of the Rhine valley. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moritz_von_Schwind_-_Der_Vater_Rhein,_die_Fidel_Volkers_spielend_-_11581_-_Bavarian_State_Painting_Collections.jpg

Romantic Landscapes (20.6/n)
#Rhine #HauntedHouses #Sleath #HorridBooks
In Eleanor Sleath's _The Orphan of the Rhine_, one of the seven horrid books mentioned in Jane Austen's _Northanger Abbey_, the landscape is mere invention, its ruins and forests imported from German Schauerromantik.