The
Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the
little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is
ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there
is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in
New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty
passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many
streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick
archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.
When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side
you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to
serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration
of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never the presence of a
great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence.
There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking
population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. The
prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy
heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture. There
are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe
streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual
Berlin hardly antedates.
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