Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2Howells, William Dean
General
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2
Howells, William Dean
Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Transatlantic voyages -- Fiction
In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German
pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble
Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of
Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. There was to
be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German
Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people
furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the
custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She was
of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and
the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed
over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor
where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof
to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred
years ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life of
the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself after
enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems the
final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.
XLVI.
On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood
the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering
conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then
she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were
not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses,
were locked against tourist curiosity.
It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this
ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets
to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the
evening of their arrival.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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