'Not, like his great Compeers, indignantly
Doth Danube spring to life!'
Before this quarter of the Black Forest was inhabited, the
source of the Danube might have suggested some of those sublime
images which Armstrong has so finely described; at present, the
contrast is most striking. The Spring appears in a capacious stone
Basin in front of a Ducal palace, with a pleasure-ground opposite;
then, passing under the pavement, takes the form of a little,
clear, bright, black, vigorous rill, barely wide enough to tempt
the agility of a child five years old to leap over it,--and
entering the garden, it joins, after a course of a few hundred
yards, a stream much more considerable than itself. The
'copiousness' of the spring at 'Doneschingen' must have procured
for it the honour of being named the Source of the Danube.