It expresses the eighteenth century, though.
But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the
nineteenth."

"I don't," she whispered back. "I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I
like to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the
Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I
am consistent."

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the
way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb
of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for
Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is
outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows,
which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by
a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the
Meistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church,
as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his
bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded
beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the
four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her
husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded
amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You are
right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can't enjoy Gothic here
any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg."

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit
the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the
heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were
jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for
the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time
for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way
the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the
German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of
their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that
one was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their
system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open,
and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups
representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood
each in a gravelled plot, t