umberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls of wrought stone
had been piled along the streets and around the squares, and were now
grown, in truth, like nature's self again, in their rough, time-worn
massiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where their decay accumulated,
blossoming, always the same, beyond people's memories, every summer, as
the storks came back to their platforms on the remote chimney-tops.
Without, all was as it had been on the eve of the Thirty Years' War:
the venerable dark-green mouldiness, priceless pearl of architectural
effect, was unbroken [122] by a single new gable. And within, human
life--its thoughts, its habits, above all, its etiquette--had been put
out by no matter of excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all,
one might say, at any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full
to overflowing with furniture, which, useful or useless, was all
ornamental, and none of it new. Suppose the various objects,
especially the contents of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged
and ticketed, and their Highnesses would have had a historic museum,
after which those famed "Green Vaults" at Dresden would hardly have
counted as one of the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense
heraldry, that truly German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid,
eloquent, over everything, without and within--windows, house-fronts,
church walls, and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants
were big or little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative
order--the treble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the
court poet, and the like--each with his deputies and assistants,
maintaining, all unbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just
noticeable as they slipped away. At court, with a continuous round of
ceremonies, which, though early in the day, must always take place
under a jealous exclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in perpetual
candle-light.

It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms, escaped
from that candle-light [123] into the broad day of the uppermost
windows, that the young Duke Carl laid his hand on an old volume of the
year 1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece, perhaps, by Albert
Duerer--Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification: by Conrad Celtes.
Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third, he had the right to
speak on that subject; for while he vindicated as best he might old
German literature against the char