nd the sky is gray; but
under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the
architecture. There are hints of the older German cities in some of the
remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which
in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the
world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.
They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they
poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in
niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street
corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort
which fails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they
would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is
a self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic,
more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This
offensive art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic
spirit, and bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in
literature bears to romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to
Kaiser Wilhelm I., a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering
bronze, commemorating the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the
war with the last French Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the
victors by its ugliness. The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men
and animals backs away from the imperial palace, and saves itself too
soon from plunging over the border of a canal behind it, not far from
Rauch's great statue of the great Frederic. To come to it from the
simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some
exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar
of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered by its wild
explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the
imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the
obligation to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They
entered the court without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other
strangers straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner
of the building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a
custodian took charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined
plains of brick to the state apartments. In the antechamber they found a
provision of im