ary ardour flushes over your heart at the recital,
and the echoes of a hundred battles thunder in your ears.
Through this gate, which is in the Dorotheen Stadt, after crossing the
Square of Paris, we enter upon one of the handsomest streets in the
world, and one bearing the most poetical of titles:
"Unter-den-Linden,"--"Under the Lime Trees!"--there is something at once
charming and imposing in the very sound. Nor is this appellation an
empty fiction, for there stand the lime trees themselves, in two double
rows with their delicate green leaves rustling in the breeze, forming a
two-fold verdant allee, vigorous and fragrant, down the centre of the
street, and into the very heart of the city. Unter-den-Linden itself is
two thousand seven hundred and fifty-four feet in length, and one hundred
and seventy-four in width; but it extends, under another title, for a
much greater distance. This is the summer evening's ramble of your true
Berliner, and not a little proud and pompous he is as he parades himself
and family beneath the leafy canopy; and here, in the snowy winters, when
the city lies half buried in the snowdrift, the gaily dressed sleighs go
skimming under the leafless branches, filling the bright cold air with
the music of their bells.
As we proceed deeper into the city, we find gay shops and stately houses.
A noble range of buildings appropriated to the foreign embassies rises
upon the left hand, and is succeeded by the Royal Academy; while some
distance beyond stands the University, an edifice of a rather sombre
appearance, although graced with columns and pilasters of the Corinthian
order. To enter it you traverse a spacious court-yard, and it may be
that the nature of its contents impart a melancholy character to the
building itself; for, on ascending its stone staircase, and wandering for
a brief period among its bottles and cases, its wax models and human
preserves, we find them of so unsightly and disgusting a character that
we are happy to regain the echoing corridor which had led us into this
huge, systematised charnel-house.
As we cross to the opposite side of the broad street, the Royal Library
faces us; a massive temple of stored knowledge, polyglot and universal;
while to the right of it, in the centre of a paved space of considerable
extent, stands the Catholic church of St. Hedwig, at once a model of
Roman architecture, and the emblem of the liberty of faith.
Close at hand is the Opera-hous
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