It was,
unimpeachably perfect in its way, "Just," March murmured to his wife, "as
the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century
was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to find
the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how much
the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Look
at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificent
swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get
behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the
baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how you
long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth."
"I don't," she whispered back. "I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I like
to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic
I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I am
consistent."
She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the
way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of
Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for
Longfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is
outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows,
which now represent the birds he loved.
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