Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2Howells, William Dean
General
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2
Howells, William Dean
Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Transatlantic voyages -- Fiction
The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that
afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was
trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel
lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator
which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up. All
the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as
nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of
a world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the
picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the
commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothic
spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness,
of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive grace and
beauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a strenuous,
gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible,
and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.
They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the
ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was a
sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside.
of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare demanded
their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know where they
wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the
conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the public
garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make the
most favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so like all
other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that
it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and
they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested
from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the
charm of the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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