him. It is in the French taste, and is
so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French
supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the
overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on
horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which
the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It
is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt
in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic
monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which
these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying
warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were
moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which
dropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:
Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel;
Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.
To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the
German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with
Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!
The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon
should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist,
which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches;
for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt to
be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and
sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how much
seemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and pleasure. In
what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they
were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children
seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things. The Marches
met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the
winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found
them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed subdued, and were
silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of
Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old
couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each
other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeed
children of that sad second childhood which one w
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