The subject is too prolific in suggestions; I cannot proceed. It is also too great for my limited time, especially as other attractions are luring me on. What a street! what shops! filled with wonders in metal and precious stones. What bronzes and jewels! Why do we never see such exquisite productions in our palatial stores? Lingerers around shop-windows find a paradise in this promenade; but here is an “Arcade,” the stone sides carved to the lofty cornices, arches of glass stretching across the way from eave to eave, the street paved in mosaic, and here and there in recesses clusters of exotics and palms. What wares are exhibited in this virtuoso’s Eden! I stand in front of the window, lost in thought, until tired with the contemplation of unspeakable things.
Seeing a shrubbery and seats, I sit down by a little table for repose, when in a moment, from some invisible source overhead, like the orchestra in Wilhelm Meister, there bursts forth the most bewitching music. I am in heaven. I hear the hosannas of the celestial hosts. The shops are where the redeemed work for love of men.
The people passing to and fro know nothing of accounts, nor the perplexities of trade. They have ceased from their troubles—are at home—at rest. I am brought to eat ambrosia and drink the nectar and hear the music of the gods, and yet I am but a novice in this celestial city, and wait for the loving hands that shall lead me to the friends gone before....
I have made the tour of “Unter den Linden,” and am sitting here just long enough to collect my wandering thoughts before moving on. I feel as if I had been the victim of one of De Quincey’s dreams, and wait the awakening that will release me from its spell. As I recline here at my leisure, with a sandstone fountain making music at my feet, and grapevines and beeches embowering me about, I get a good view of the famous Brandenburg Gate and the statue of Victory, with her chariot and four, on the top. As I look on the magnificent group from where I am on the Thiergarten side, Victory has her back to me, her horses galloping with full speed towards the palace of the king. I had supposed, from pictures I had seen, that she was driving towards the park. I cannot have been mistaken. If so, why was such a ponderous mass turned around?
While endeavoring to explain to myself what seemed so strange, a young man took a seat by my side. Addressing him, “How is it? Isn’t Victory reversed?” “Ja wohl!” he replies. How assuring the affix “wohl” in the hearty German expression of assent! It is the abracadabra that drives out fear, and fills up the great gulf between the stranger and yourself, enabling your sympathies to run over and interchange. Long live the noble people that always say, “Yes, well,” and never, “Yes, ill.”
“Ja wohl!” he replies. “Why?” “Well, you see,”—I knew by the expression lighting up his face that he was going to tell me of something that pleased,—“it was before the last struggle that Victory was driving her horses in the direction of Paris. The war came. The French were victors, and carried off our statue as a trophy to flatter their vanity and decorate their capital at the same time. Good, but in ’70 it was our turn. The whipped became whippers. We beat the French and brought our Victory home, replanted her on her original site, with her back to Frankreich, her face looking proudly towards the Fatherland, as if she were glad and happy to be at home.”
[Here we pass over pages of description of what was to be seen in the galleries and churches, to come again to the traveller’s out-door impressions.]
In the first place, the climate, to my surprise, is perfect. I am sitting here at noon in August—smothering with us—in an atmosphere exhilarating and cool; men are passing with light overcoats, as if they were a trifle anxious to anticipate the September winds, and this is what the weather has been since leaving Erin, where it was, to my surprise, too dry and warm. Remember, that all I say about countries and people is only what I have felt and seen. Every evening I wear a light overcoat, and find it about right. In the second place, there is no dust in Berlin, simply because the streets, which are better—all of them—than the concrete around the Philadelphia City Hall, are never allowed to get dirty; are flooded with water and dried every morning, and kept so. Nothing objectionable is permitted to remain on them for a moment. Clean, uniformed men—and handsome, gentlemanly-looking fellows they are, too—are constantly moving along with enclosed wheelbarrows, shovels, and brooms, removing whatever may offend; even their instruments for cleaning are designed artistically and free from soil. I can imagine the wheelbarrows attractive as flower receptacles at large gatherings, so graceful are they. You would tie bows on the shovels and hang them on the wall.
With these whatever is offensive on the streets is at once emptied into cast-iron receptacles, in themselves ornamental, arranged along the thoroughfares, and which are emptied before daybreak every day. The streets, as I said before, are many of them flooded with water daily, then dried with enormous squilgees (that’s what they are called on shipboard),—that is, a band of rubber fitted into a socket of wood, something like what, with us, careful housewives use to dry windows, except that these are a yard wide, and one sweep of them over a wet street leaves a band its width as dry as a board and as clean as a dinner plate. In order to do this, of course the streets have to be absolutely smooth,—as they are, not the slightest indentation being visible. Then neatly-painted and handsomely-designed water-carts traverse every street a number of times daily, ejecting showers of misty spray; a work of supererogation, you say, to prevent any particle of dust that may be left from getting into the air. It is actually true that a child with a cambric dress could roll in the middle of any crowded thoroughfare with as much security from soil as if occupying a chair in a summer boarding-house.