Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 5: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland, Part 1
Austria -- Description and travel; Germany -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
In going out to Charlottenburg, we rode through the Thiergarten, the
Tuileries of Berlin. In one of the most quiet and sequestered spots is
the monument erected by the people of Berlin to their old king. The
pedestal is Carrara marble, sculptured with beautiful scenes called
garden pleasures--children in all manner of outdoor sports, and parents
fondly looking on. It is graceful, and peculiarly appropriate to those
grounds where parents and children are constantly congregating. The
whole is surmounted by a statue of the king, in white marble--the finest
representation of him I have ever seen. Thoughtful, yet benign, the old
king seems like a good father keeping a grave and affectionate watch
over the pleasures of his children in their garden frolics. There was
something about these moss-grown gardens that seemed so rural and
pastoral, that I at once preferred them to all I had seen in Europe.
Choice flowers are planted in knots, here and there, in sheltered nooks,
as if they had grown by accident: and an air of sweet, natural wildness
is left amid the most careful cultivation. The people seemed to be
enjoying themselves less demonstratively and with less vivacity than in
France, but with a calm inwardness. Each nation has its own way of being
happy, and the style of life in each bears a certain relation of
appropriateness to character. The trim, dressy, animated air of the
Tuileries suits admirably with the mobile, sprightly vivacity of society
there. Both, in their way, are beautiful; but this seems less formal,
and more according to nature.
[Footnote A: From "Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands."]
[Footnote B: King Frederick William III. and Queen Louise are here
referred to. Since Mrs. Stowe's visit (1854) the Emperor William I. and
the Empress Augusta have been buried in this mausoleum.]
LEIPSIC AND DRESDEN[A]
BY BAYARD TAYLOR
I have now been nearly two days in wide-famed Leipsic, and the more I
see of it, the better I like it. It is a pleasant, friendly town, old
enough to be interesting and new enough to be comfortable. There is much
active business-life, through which it is fast increasing in size and
beauty. Its publishing establishments are the largest in the world, and
its annual fairs attended by people from all parts of Europe. This is
much for a city to accomplish situated alone in the middle of a great
plain, with no natural charms of scenery or treasures of art to attract
strangers. The energy and enterprise of its merchants have accomplished
all this, and it now stands in importance among the first cities of
Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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