shortest or conjugate diameter, from Friedland in Bohemia
(Wallenstein's old Friedland), by Breslau across the Oder to the
Polish Frontier, is about 100. The total area of Schlesien is
counted to be some 20,000 square miles, nearly the third of
England Proper.

Schlesien--will the reader learn to call it by that name, on
occasion? for in these sad Manuscripts of ours the names alternate
--is a fine, fertile, useful and beautiful Country. It leans
sloping, as we hinted, to the East and to the North; a long curved
buttress of Mountains ("RIESENGEBIRGE, Giant Mountains," is their
best-known name in foreign countries) holding it up on the South
and West sides. This Giant-Mountain Range,--which is a kind of
continuation of the Saxon-Bohemian "Metal Mountains (ERZGEBIRGE)"
and of the straggling Lausitz Mountains, to westward of these,
--shapes itself like a bill-hook (or elliptically, as was said):
handle and hook together may be some 200 miles in length.
The precipitous side of this is, in general, turned outwards,
towards Bohmen, Mahren, Ungarn (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, in our
dialects); and Schlesien lies inside, irregularly sloping down,
towards the Baltic and towards the utmost East, From the Bohemian
side of these Mountains there rise two Rivers: Elbe, tending for
the West; Morawa for the South;--Morawa, crossing Moravia, gets
into the Donau, and thence into the Black-Sea; while Elbe, after
intricate adventures among the mountains, and then prosperously
across the plains, is out, with its many ships, into the Atlantic.
Two rivers, we say, from the Bohemian or steep side: and again,
from the Silesian side, there rise other two, the Oder and the
Weichsel (VISTULA); which start pretty near one another in the
Southeast, and, after wide windings, get both into the Baltic, at a