The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer-lytton

THE banks of the Rhine now shelved away into sweeping plains, and on their right rose the once imperial city of Boppart. In no journey of similar length do you meet with such striking instances of the mutability and shifts of power. To find, as in the Memphian Egypt, a city sunk into a heap of desolate ruins; the hum, the roar, the mart of nations, hushed into the silence of ancestral tombs, is less humbling to our human vanity than to mark, as along the Rhine, the kingly city dwindled into the humble town or the dreary village, -- decay without its grandeur, change without the awe of its solitude! On the site on which Drusus raised his Roman tower, and the kings of the Franks their palaces, trade now dribbles in tobacco-pipes, and transforms into an excellent cotton factory the antique nunnery of Konigsberg! So be it; it is the progressive order of things, -- the world itself will soon be one excellent cotton factory!

"Look," said Trevylyan, as they sailed on, "at yonder mountain, with its two traditionary Castles of Liebenstein and Sternfels."