ves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. The
prevailing tone of the city and 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 plain