Later in the day the Crown Prince and Crown Princess entertained the royal guests at dinner; and Prince Bismarck, as usual on the Emperor's birthday, gave a dinner to the Diplomatic Corps. A drizzling rain set in suddenly in the afternoon, sending dismay to the hearts of all; for the most brilliant part of the celebration was still in reserve for the evening. The rain fell in occasional light showers up to a late hour, but it dampened only the outer garb, not the hearts, of the undiminished multitude, which at night-fall, on foot or in carriages, thronged the streets of the brilliant capital, whose myriad lights showed to better advantage under the reflecting clouds than they would have done under starlight. The carriages numbered scores of thousands, and the people on foot hundreds of thousands; but so complete were the arrangements of the police and so obedient the concourse, that all proceeded in nearly perfect order. Our coachman fortunately drove through Old Berlin and Köln, as a preliminary to the evening's sight-seeing. Long arcades filled with Jews' shops were worthy the pen of Dickens. This festal day made this most ancient portion of the city also one of the most picturesque. Houses with quaint dormer windows roofed by "eyelids," of an architecture dating back two or three hundred years, gleamed with candles in every window. Almost no house or shop was so poor as to dispense with its share of the universal illumination. At least three horizontal lines of lighted candles threaded both sides of every street of this city of a million and a half inhabitants. Many private as well as public buildings in the old part showed by colored lights the picturesque, quaint streets and nooks, as no light of day can ever do. We were passing the Rath-haus, or City Hall,—a modern and imposing edifice,—at the time when its great tower was being lighted up. Three hundred feet above the pavement floated the flags grouped in the centre and at the corners of the square tower. Invisible red fires illuminated them, the shafts of crimson light rising to the clouds above, the outlines of the remainder of the building dimly reposing in darkness. An immense electric light, guided by a reflector in another tower, shot a bridge of white light high in air across the river, and fell, like a circumscribed space of noonday amid black darkness, on the fine equestrian statue of the Great Elector by the bridge behind the Old Castle, with an effect almost indescribable. As we entered Unter den Linden by the Lustgarten, the beautiful square and its historic edifices, which form an ideal sight even by daylight, glowed and gleamed with jets of light from every point. The Old Schloss showed continuous lines of illumination in the windows of its four stories, along its front of six hundred and fifty feet, while the majestic dome caught and reflected rays of light from every point of the horizon. On the opposite side of the Lustgarten, the Doric portico of the National Gallery glowed with rose-colored light from massive Grecian lamps, while the arched entrance beneath its superb staircase gleamed with a pale sea-green radiance like the entrance to some ocean cave. The incomparable architecture of the Old Museum was set in strong relief by white light, which flooded its immense Ionic colonnade and brought out the high colors of the colossal frescos along the three hundred feet of its magnificent portico. The front of the palace of the Crown Prince was thrown, by innumerable jets, into a blaze of crimson. The Roman Catholic Church of St. Hedwig, with its dome in imitation of the Pantheon, its Latin cross and window arches beaming in pale yellow, made a fine background for the only unilluminated building, the palace of the Emperor. From the Opera House, the Arsenal, and the University, crowns and elaborate designs were burning, yet unconsumed. Most elaborately decorated of all Berlin buildings was the Academy of Arts and Sciences, opposite the Imperial Palace, with colossal warriors in bronze keeping guard at its portals, and the Angel of Peace laying a laurel wreath on the altar of Fatherland as its decorative centre-piece. No high meaning of all its symbols was more touching and significant than the appropriate texts of Scripture written for the Kaiser's eye, underneath its elaborate frescos. But of what avail would be an attempt to describe two miles of most beautiful decorations along Unter den Linden, each one a study in itself, and having nothing in common with the others, except the eagles and the Emperor's monogram; and the innumerable points of light, massed in a world of various forms, and in all the colors of the rainbow! This glow of splendor surrounded by the dense darkness covered the city, and the dazzling coronals of its lofty towers and domes and spires must have been visible to a great distance across the plains of Brandenburg.
Slowly the triple line of carriages and the surging throng pressed onward, past the palaces and diplomatic residences of the Pariser Platz; some diverging down the Wilhelm Strasse, where streaming flags and blazing illuminations made noonday brightness and gayety about the palace of the Chancellor, but most passing through the Brandenburg Gate. The massive Doric columns of this impressive structure were in darkness, but the Chariot of Victory with its fine bronze horses, surmounting the gate, was weird with the scarlet light of Bengal fires burning on the entablature.
As the artist rests his eyes by the spot of neutral gray which he keeps for the purpose on wall or palette, so brain and eye were prepared for sleep at the close of this long day, by sitting in our carriages, safe sheltered from the soft-falling rain, outside the great gate which divided the splendor from the darkness, for three quarters of an hour, in an inextricable tangle of carriages, until the perturbed coachmen and the sorely vexed police could evolve order from the temporary confusion, and set the hindered procession again on its homeward way.
Meantime the day was not over for the much-enduring Emperor and his royal guests. In the famous White Saloon of the Old Schloss an entertainment was going forward. Blinding coronets and necklaces on royal ladies made the interior of this ancient palace more brilliant than its shining exterior on this birth-night. The Empress Augusta, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Prince William, was attired in a lace-trimmed robe of pale green, her diamonds a mass of sparkling light; the Crown Princess was in silver-gray, the wife of the English Ambassador in pale mauve, the Princess Christian in turquoise blue; and the Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia wore a magnificent robe of pink satin trimmed with sable, with a tiara of diamonds and a stomacher of diamonds and emeralds. From the neck and forehead of the Queen of Roumania flashed a thousand prismatic hues; and the Green Vault of Dresden sent some of its most precious treasures to keep company with the fair Queen of Saxony in adding brilliance to the scene.
Our reverie led from this starry point in history back to the time when, as on this memorable day, the royal salute of Berlin artillery shook the city, to announce the birth of a prince ninety years ago. A rapid, almost a chance recall of the years shows us Washington then living on his estate at Mount Vernon, Lafayette a young man of forty, Clay a stripling of twenty, Webster a boy of fifteen. The Directory in France had not yet made way for the First Republic; the younger Pitt and Canning held England; Metternich and O'Connell were in their youth, and Robert Peel was a child of nine. Napoleon Bonaparte was in the flush of youthful success, soon to become the idol of France and the terror of Europe, before whom the boy, now Kaiser Wilhelm, and his royal family fled to Königsberg by the Baltic, while the conqueror held Berlin and reduced Prussia to a second-rate province. To this boy the flames of burning Moscow were a transient aurora-borealis under the pole-star; and Nelson and Wellington were unknown to the stories of his childhood, for as yet their fame was not. Goethe and Schiller were in the prime of early manhood; Kant and Klopstock elderly, but with years yet to live; Scott was just laying down his poet's pen and preparing to take up the immortal quill with which he wrote his first "Waverley;" Moore was singing his sweet melodies; Wordsworth had yet to lay the foundations of the "Lake Poetry;" and the fair boy, Byron, was chanting his early songs, not yet for many a year to die at Missolonghi.
This wonderful old man of ninety, gayly stooping to kiss the hand of a lady to-night in his hospitable palace, like the young man that he is, has a memory stretching from the battle of Austerlitz across the gigantic struggles of the century to the battle of Sedan,—all of which he has seen, and a part of which he has been!
